The Memento (10 page)

Later, when I come into the parlour to clear up his dishes, he was there, no cough, lying on the sofa like he was sleeping as he usually did after a snack, but there was a stillness in that room that I did not recognize. I washed up all the dishes, dried them and put them in the cupboard, Grampie’s teacup with the ferns and red birds beside the other teacups and the pot, the plates. I wiped down the counter and hung the dishcloth to dry. I swept the floor clean, making the house neat and tidy, the way Grampie and I liked it. Jake was lying by Grampie and he didn’t move as I went through the house. The air smelled like faded turpentine and beeswax. I went out on the verandah. The cicadas were buzzing. It was when I looked at our chairs, Grampie’s big chair, and my little one. When I knew he wasn’t making supper ever again, and we would never sit there while the sun went down, watching the shadows reach for the walls of the Tea House, tears slid down my cheeks.

Jake come and sat beside me wagging his tail. Together we went through the forest on the path to Petal’s End to get Loretta. When we come back, Ma was sitting on the porch and she stood up. It was like she knew he was dead. Loretta made me stay outside while she went inside with my mother to see Grampie’s dead body.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
, Ma cooed as we stood in the graveyard on Flying Squirrel Road and they threw the soil on Grampie’s coffin. There was no proper funeral. He was laid out in the parlour at the Tea House, as he desired. We had a short graveside service at his burial. People come from all over and the cars lined the narrow dirt road.

Grampie was buried fast because he didn’t want no embalming. We all understood the desire to rot back into dirt. I threw in my flowers as the dirt thudded down on that wooden box, the abiding peonies and the longing roses, and Ma wrung her hands and lit a cigarette, her lipstick smearing on the butt, watching me.
Don’t you cry, hush hush hush-a-bye, poor little Fancy Mosher
.

Grampie dying was the worst thing that could have happened, but he’d foreseen that, which is why he had arranged for me to go from his to Loretta’s care. Ma would never contest it and Grampie knew that. They shovelled in the dirt as we stood there, Ma and Loretta and me and Ronnie, and my ten brothers and sisters and all them nephews and nieces and people I didn’t know, people who wouldn’t stay because Grampie’s will left everything to Loretta. He’d made arrangements with his lawyer years before. The family faded away again once Grampie was laid to rest. But that day we was all there, my estranged family, my dead brother John Lee in his grave beside Grampie and my grandmother and their parents before them.

When the burial was done and Loretta had led us through hymn singing, she took me along to Petal’s End. There weren’t no reception after the burial. Grampie never liked standing around eating finger sandwiches. After supper Loretta took me over to Grampie’s to get some of my things. Ma got there before us. She’d taken a saw
to several of his bird feeders. Loretta locked the doors then started the car again but I could still hear Ma rambling as she came lurching over to the car. “This place should be mine. You know it should, Loretta. He didn’t leave me nothing. He even took my daughter, the twelfth-born. That’s a sin, to take a child. It all should be mine.”

Loretta put the window down. “It should be no such thing, Marilyn. Your father bought you the house you live in and this he left to me. You’ll do well to stay away, that’s all I know. Give me strength, oh Risen Lord. You are not fit to be a mother, as much as it pains me to say so, and you know it does.”

Ma’s eyes were huge. “Loretta, you know what the truth is. Jesus wept. She’ll believe. You know she will, Loretta, you know. It’s in her nature to believe. You aren’t any different than me and you can pretend, and you can go about with your hair covered and your quiet ways and living the spinster life, but you ain’t no different. How can you take Fancy away from me, knowing what you do? You’re putting a curse on me.”

Loretta gripped the steering wheel, saying over and over, “Pay her no mind, Fancy, pay her no mind,” like she was praying, hailing Holy Mother Mercy, her face steady, but Ma had got to her. Then she suddenly got out of the car and pointed her finger at Ma, looking down her arm and over her outstretched fingertip like she was taking aim.

“The truth? I do know what the truth is. And
you
gave your
word
, Marilyn Mosher. On your father’s grave you will keep that word. Let the dead bury the dead. He did everything he could for you. May the Risen Lord have mercy on your soul, Marilyn, for you are well down a road which has but one destination.” Loretta kept her hand up like she was warding off evil.

Ma, in her tight top and skirt, wobbling on her high heels, looked at Loretta’s small hand before shifting her gaze to me, the smoke from her cigarette going straight up. Ma was crying as she swayed
back to her car and got in. I cried too. I could feel her longing for her father. For, despite her hostility, Ma relied on Grampie to keep her steady and now he was gone. The place was rank with her fear.

We listened to her car go roaring down the lane and up the hill to her house. That’s when I got out of the car to find Jake. We were taking him with us to Petal’s End. He was stretched out in the painting studio in the sun, where he liked to be, at the foot of Grampie’s armchair. When I called his name he did not move. Loretta had Hector come over and he buried the dog out back by the white pine trees.

The twelve-year-old me stood on the verandah of the Tea House thinking of that man in the trees and of Grampie’s letter. Who was he? Had it only been shadows? A feeling came over me. It was confusion, the rampant confusion you feel at that young age. But with the windows boarded up, the calm of the house felt beyond reach. I closed my eyes, scattered thoughts of Loretta and Grampie hiding things from me, of Ma using me, when a quivering high voice come out of the forest.
Fancy Mosher
, it said, rising on the end of my name, a question. I could hear steps, slow and steady. Out of fear I whistled, trying to drown out the steps and faint humming, and there was a sweaty hand on my wrist and I screamed, opening up my eyes, shaking off the hand. Art leapt back and fell down hard on the verandah floor.

“Oh, Art, what you doing here, you idiot?” He was even more scared than me, wide-eyed, looking up at me. “Sorry. You looked like you were in a trance, and I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Well, you did just that. What are you doing here?”

“I figured you’d come here. After today, after finding out …”

“You checking up on me?”

Art took the letter that I held out to him and read it, his hand shaking. He looked around as he gave it back. “So it really is true. What did your Grampie think you saw? Do you think that
anything will come looking for you? Are you afraid? We should go. We shouldn’t be here.”

“Do you think I got any answers, Art? It’s all just so mixed up. I don’t know if anything will come calling. Of course I am afraid. What secrets are they still keeping?”

Art let out a nervous laugh, and at the same time I heard a rustle at the back of the house. “Did you hear that?” Art shook his head as I took off running. There was nothing there, just the boarded-up windows of the painting room. I ran to the woodshed and pulled out the rusty screwdriver shoved through the latch, grabbed a hammer, went back to the house and started prying at the nails.

Art cleared his throat and squeaked, “Do you think you should do this?”

I ignored him and kept pushing, loosening the two nails at the bottom.

“If you come all the way over then help me, Art. For my birthday present. That’s all I want. Think of this as my party.”

Together we pulled the board off. It wasn’t hard to push the window open and I pulled myself up and went in, Art close behind me. We were quiet as cats, being twelve and thin and nimble. It was dark in there but the bit of sunset coming in the window glinted off a few of the teacups on the shelf. I heard and felt warm breath by my ear. It spoke, and it was Art again, and I whacked him. “Stop scaring me. I keep thinking …” But I didn’t have to finish, for he understood.

I took out the flashlight from my backpack and shone it around the room. The walls were covered in Grampie’s paintings. There was the lingering scent of oil paint and turpentine, smells that diminish but never disappear. I went into the kitchen. It was warm inside from the sun beating down all day. On the top shelf was the fancy china set,
Blossom Time
, and on the bottom shelf, where I’d washed and put it three years ago, was my grandfather’s cup. And there too on the shelf was John Lee’s little cup.

I came into the painting room, Art behind me like a caboose. He went over to the window. “Let’s go. It doesn’t feel right in here.”

“Don’t be afraid of the dark, Art,” I said, turning to go up the stairs, the flashlight beam lighting up the embroidery I’d done, hung up on the wall. I studied it: Grampie carefully stitched, lying on the sofa. I went up the stairs, two at a time, and stood in the doorway of Grampie’s bedroom staring at Grampie’s bed, stripped and bare, and above it, the painting of my grandmother blowing me a kiss from her crippled hand, the sunshine all around her. Art was calling to me, his voice even higher than normal, fright right through him now.

I stood paralyzed in the desiccated air, staring at the painting, Art still calling to me, inching closer, probably thinking something bad had happened upstairs because you don’t go upstairs in a dark boarded-up house at sunset.
Please
, I prayed,
please let my grandmother start talking, give me a message
. I called to the memento to come right then. But it was just a painting, of course. Defeated, I turned and shone my light down the stairs, and just then there was a flash of white at the bottom. I had the sharp sense that something else had come in through the window behind me and Art, and that it wasn’t me doing the looking, and my heart started pounding and I started whistling.

I swallowed hard and followed the flash of white, but there was nothing waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs but a mirror and my big eyes looking back at me. My flashlight guided me to the kitchen and then back to where Art was now waiting by the window outside. He looked like he was going to cry when he saw me, and I gave him Grampie’s and John Lee’s teacups, holding them through the open window. Art stood there gaping at me, his arms folded on his chest.

“Just take them,” I said. There was a creak behind me then, and heavy breathing on my face. “Please. Please, Art, take the cups. Did you hear that? Take the cups,” I said.

“I don’t hear nothing but your breathing, Fancy. You sound like Jenny Parker, like you’re having an asthma attack.” Art was afraid as he looked at me, and slowly I realized what he was afraid of. Me. Art was scared of me. He backed up even as he held out his hands and took the saucers, not letting his fingers touch the rims of the cups, holding them away like they was contaminated. I heaved myself out the window but my dress caught on the sill and I tumbled out, crashing down on Art, smacking my head against his, my ears ringing as I rolled over in the grass, stars in my eyes. I rooted like a goat, my hands coming up with pieces of cup, crying now, calling out for Grampie, his name as sharp on my tongue as the piece of broken china that cut into my finger, and I sat back up.

“I’m no believer,” I screamed out. Art reached over and pried my fingers open. They were slippery with blood.

“It’s fine. Look,” he said, his voice urgent. “Fancy, look.” In one hand I held pieces of the saucers, in the other, the teacups, chipped, the handle broken off Grampie’s, John Lee’s untouched, both of them smeared with my blood. They were okay. “We need to get going. Your grandfather wouldn’t like us here. He wouldn’t have wanted it like this. You know it.”

I sat there with the china and he nailed the board back to the window, and disappeared while he took the hammer back to the woodshed. I wrapped the teacup and saucer pieces in my sweater and put them in my backpack.

Art went through the woods with me, through that overgrown trail back to Petal’s End. It was dark by then but our feet knew the land better than our eyes.

“What was that song you were whistling in the Tea House?” he asked me, weakly.

“I don’t know. Must have been the song Grampie sang to me.”

“No,” he said. “I never heard it before.”

“It felt like something was in there looking for me.”

“Maybe we woke up the wood spirits, Fancy. Maybe that’s it. The hobgobblies.”

We said nothing more as we passed through the garden door, pulling it shut tight behind us.

Art followed me through the garden, saying he would get one of the old bicycles and ride it home. The bikes were in one of the carriage houses and Hector had them all tuned up.

“What are you going to do with the cups? Do you think—”

“I don’t know, Art. I don’t know if I’m like Grampie.” The moon was low and we were now by the Wishing Pool, closed in by the cedars. I took the cups out of my backpack, kneeling by the water. A frog croaked. The moon was rising.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It just occurred to me that Grampie looked no different lying on the sofa napping than when he was dead.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I don’t know.” I scooped the moon water into both cups, disturbing a frog who splashed away. The water was clear and I sang,
Angels are coming to watch over thee, So listen to the wind coming over the sea
. The uneven stones cut into my knee as I lifted Grampie’s teacup to my lips and took a sip. I took another sip, this time from John Lee’s cup, still singing,
Hang your head o’er and hear the wind blow
, and I saw a small face behind my shoulder, reflected in the water, white like the moon. Art was beside me, and I could feel his warm breath on my cheek.

“Can you see him?” he whispered. “Is Grampie here? John Lee?”

It was still, and an owl called out. Art’s hand snapped out and flipped the cups from my grubby fingers. They shattered on the rock edge and fell to the bottom of the Wishing Pool. “What are you doing?” I screamed, not caring if Loretta heard us, or if I frightened either of them.
They
should
be afraid. I am Fancy Mosher, seer of the dead
, I thought.