Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Sometimes I inadvertently brought on my grandmother’s tears myself, by repeating things Billy told me. Perhaps he, too, was firing the balls made on the other side of the green, or pebbles, suited to the verbal slingshot of his tender years. “Is it true that Nimble (the one horse — later there were two horses, the second unfortunately named Maud, the name, straight from Tennyson, of one of my aunts) — is it true that Nimble belongs to Uncle Neddy? Billy says he does. And that Nelly and Martha Washington do, too?” (The cow and her calf; I had named the calf myself.)

My grandmother grew indignant. “I gave your Uncle Edward that horse on his tenth wedding anniversary! Not only that, but he sold him back to me two years afterwards and he still keeps saying I haven’t finished paying him yet! When I have! And he uses that horse all the time, much more than we do!”

“Oh pshaw, mother,” said my grandfather. “That’s an old story now.”

“Oh yes,” said my grandmother. “Nimble, and the buffalo robe, and the dinner service, and pew rent —they’re all old stories now. You’d never remember anything. But I won’t forget. I won’t forget.” And she set the rocking chair rocking as if it were, as it probably was, a memory machine.

I have a few more memories of Uncle Neddy at this period in his life when the tinsmith business was still going on, and the furnace business, flourishing or not, I don’t know, but before the obvious decline had set in and before I went away to Boston and saw him at less and less frequent intervals. One memory, brief but poignant, like a childhood nightmare that haunts one for years, or all one’s life, the details are so clear and so awful, is of a certain Christmas. Or maybe it was a Christmas Eve, because it takes place after the lamps were lit — but of course it grew dark very early in the winter. There was a large Christmas tree, smelling overpoweringly of fir, in the parlor. It was rather sparsely decorated with colored paper chains, strings of tinsel and popcorn, and a very few glass balls or other shiny ornaments: a country-fied, home-made tree, chopped down and brought fresh from the snow-covered “commons.” But there were a few little silver and gold baskets, full of candies, woven from strips of metal by “the blind children,” and clips holding twisted wax candles that after many warnings were finally lit. One of my aunts played “Holy Night” on the piano and the candles flickered in time to our singing.

This was all very nice, but still I remember it as “the Black Christmas.” My other grandparents, in the States, had sent a large box of presents. It contained woolen caps and mufflers for Billy and me, and I didn’t like them at all. His set was dark blue but mine was gray and I hated it at sight. There were also mittens and socks, and some of these were red or blue, and the high black rubber boots I’d wanted, but my pair was much too big. Laid out under the tree, even by flickering candlelight, everything looked shapeless and sad, and I wanted to cry. And then Santa Claus came in, an ordinary brown potato sack over his shoulder, with the other presents sagging in it. He was terrifying. He couldn’t have been dressed in black, but that was my impression, and I did start to cry. He had artificial snow sprinkled on his shoulders, and a pointed red cap, but the beard! It wasn’t white and woolly at all, it was made of rope, a mass of frayed-out rope. This dreadful figure cavorted around the room, making jokes in a loud, deep, false voice. The face that showed above the rope beard looked, to me, like a Negro’s. I shrieked. Then this Santa from the depths of a coal mine put down his sack that could have been filled with coal, and hugged and kissed me. Through my sobs, I recognized, by touch and smell and his suddenly everyday voice, that it was only Uncle Neddy.

This Christmas, so like a nightmare, affected me so that shortly afterward I had a real nightmare about Uncle Neddy, or at least about his shop. In it, I crossed the road and was about to go into the shop when the door was blocked by a huge horse, coming out. The horse filled the doorway, towering high over me and showing all her big yellow teeth in a grin. She whinnied, shrill and deafening; I felt the hot wind coming out of her big nostrils; it almost blew me backward. I had the presence of mind to say to the horse, “You are a nightmare!” and of course she was, and so I woke up. But awake, I still felt uncomfortable for a long time about Uncle Neddy’s possibly having been inside, his escape cut off by that fearful animal.

I said that Uncle Neddy was a great fisherman; it was the thing he did best of all, perhaps the only thing he did perfectly. (For all I know, his tin-ware, beautiful and shiny as it was, may have been badly made.) He could catch trout where no one else could and sometimes he would go off before daybreak and arrive at our house at seven o’clock with a string of rose-speckled trout for his mother’s breakfast. He could cast into the narrowest brooks and impossibly difficult spots and bring out trout after trout. He tied beautiful flies, for himself and friends, and later for customers by mail.

Our uncle, innocent of books,

Was rich in lore of fields and brooks …

Whittier wrote of his, and it was true of mine.

But he was not altogether innocent of books. There had been all that childhood Bible-reading that had left the supply of texts from which he still quoted. And also, in his parlor, on a shelf above the “cosy corner” and in a small bookcase, there was an oddly assorted collection of books. I wasn’t familiar with them the way I was, with the outsides, at least, of every single book on the shelves in the upstairs hall at my grandmother’s ( Inglesby’s Legends; Home Medicine; Emerson’s Essays; and so on), but this was only because of Aunt Hat. Every time I managed to be alone in the parlor with Uncle Neddy’s books, she soon found me and shooed me off home. But I did get to look at them, or some of them, usually the same ones over and over. It was obvious that Uncle Neddy had been strongly affected by the sinking of the Titanic; in his modest library there were three different books about this catastrophe, and in the dining room, facing his place at the table, hung a chromograph of the ship going down: the iceberg, the rising steam, people struggling in the water, everything, in full color. When I was left alone in the parlor, an ear cocked for Aunt Hat, I could scarcely wait to take out the Titanic books — one very big and heavy, red, with gilt trimmings — and look at the terrifying pictures one more time. There were also The Tower of London; a book about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; Advice to Young Men (“Avoid lonely walks…”); and several of a religious nature. Also some little fat books about a character named “Dolly Dimples” that looked nice, and were pleasant to hold, but proved boring to read. But the Titanic books with their pictures, some of them actual photographs, were the best.

The other chief attraction in Uncle Neddy’s parlor was an Edison phonograph, very old, that still worked. It had a flaring, brown-and-gold horn and played thick black cylinders. My girl cousins were allowed to play it. I remember only two out of the box of cylinders: a brief Sousa march that could have marched people about fifty yards, and “Cohen on the Telephone,” which I loved. I knew that it was supposed to be funny, and laughed, although I hadn’t any idea who or what a Cohen was or what I was laughing at, and I doubt that Uncle Neddy entirely understood it, either.

I suppose that Uncle Neddy’s situation in life, his fortune and prospects, could never have been considered happy, even in his small world, but I was very young, and except for an occasional overheard, or eavesdropped-on remark and those private conversations in the parlor or pantry that always upset my grandmother, nothing untoward came to my knowledge, consciously that is, for years. Then even I began to hear more about Uncle Neddy’s drinking, and the shop began its long deterioration. There was no place to buy liquor in the village; the nearest government liquor store was in a town fifteen miles away. At first this meant a daylong drive behind Nimble or Maud; sometimes an overnight stay at the house of a relative, niece or cousin, of my grandfather’s. Probably when Uncle Neddy went to town he brought back a supply of rum, the usual drink, heavy, dark, and strong. All I knew of alcohol at that time was the homemade wines the ladies sometimes served each other, or the hot toddy my grandfather sometimes made himself on freezing winter nights. But finally phrases like “not himself,” “taken too much,” “three seas over,” sank into my consciousness and I looked at my poor uncle with new eyes, expectantly. There was one occasion when he had to be taken away from the home funeral of Mrs. Captain McDonald, an old woman everyone was very fond of. What at first passed for Uncle Neddy’s natural if demonstrative grief had got “out of hand.” My grandmother moaned about this; in fact, she moaned so loudly in her bedroom across the hall from mine that I could hear almost every word. “He’ll disgrace us all; you’ll see. I’ve never … There’s never been a drunkard in my family … None of my brothers…” This time my grandfather remained quite silent.