The Memento (2 page)

The bus brings us down off the mountain, away from the rocky shores of Lupin Cove, down to the valley. When I get off the school bus I avoid them kids at school who laugh and point. Those kinds of people, they never change. What I learned is that all them idiots in the halls of school are the same people you meet in all the halls of life. I keep my head down. They laugh at my clothes, at my scar—they say I’m the girl who got knocked on her head, the girl who lives in the shack over by the bay where there is nothing but lobsters and rocky beach and the strange island that seems to float on the waves. I stopped going to school for a time when I lived with Grampie, the day they strapped a boy in front of the class to scare us good. No sir, I will not go back, I told him. They tried to make me but Grampie said I was staying home and he’d teach me what I needed to know. It wasn’t until he died and I was living with Loretta that I went back, to make her happy.

Loretta was from down in the valley and came to work at Petal’s End when she was a young woman in need of sanctuary. She worked as a kitchen maid and babysitter at first, moving up to
housekeeper and cook, doing a bit of everything as she got older. Good help was hard to find after the war. Grampie got her the job. Loretta owed my grandfather for a long-ago kindness, she said, even though the man was never one who kept score. She was the same age as Ma, and they both had babies when they were unmarried girls. Loretta had been shamed for having a baby unwed. Unlike Ma, she gave her baby away, and she never directly spoke of it until the summer I was twelve.

On the last day of school we do crossword puzzles and word searches and play silly games. The teacher talks about summer vacation plans. She says it is Fancy Mosher’s birthday and she makes the class sing to me, although the only voices I hear are hers and Art Comeau’s. Art and I have grown up together and travel back and forth on that godforsaken bus. Art is my only true friend. This summer, we’ll be Loretta’s helpers at Petal’s End and we want nothing more than for the school year to finish up and to get working. The Parkers are actually paying us, a real summer job, not just picking berries. There is much to do, what with the rumour Lady Marigold Parker is finally coming back. No one gave Loretta any information about when or if any other Parkers would be coming out with her. That’s not on their mind, keeping us abreast of their plans, no sir. They’re fighting, we know that much, the Parker women are feuding. But that summer day in the classroom Art and I are just excited thinking how Petal’s End might come back to life, alive again with all them stories we’d grown up on, the parties and the exotic visitors from all over creation.

I’m on the steps at school waiting for Art, eating my sandwich and the birthday cookies Loretta made. Art is in the music room helping the teacher tidy it for summer. He is late and I am almost finished lunch. Other kids are off on the lawn under the deep shade of the red maples, eating and laughing, happy in the way
summer makes people. The solitude of the concrete steps is where I feel best. I chew on ham and fresh lettuce leaves, lettuce from the kitchen garden at Petal’s End. Loretta and I started it from seed and it came early. We grow all our own vegetables in the summer. I’m thinking about that when Ma arrives.

I hear her car before I see it, the muffler about to go, Ma gunning the gas. She has a relic of a car. It’s not intentionally an antique. Ma won’t ever buy anything new or full price. The enormous lilac hedges are blooming between the school building and the parking lot. Through the blossoms I watch Ma park. She shuts the engine off but she doesn’t get out. Cigarette smoke trails out the car window.

I didn’t see my mother much after I went to live with Grampie in his home called the Tea House when I was three years old. They took me from her, out of the back seat of her car in a ditch full of flowers on the side of the road rolling down into the valley. We’d been on our way to return her booze bottles. Ma was blind drunk, she didn’t see nor hear the police sirens or see their big hands reach for me in the back seat, where I was lying with a concussion and a cut on my cheek swirling from my lip right across my cheekbone and into my hair. Grampie said later it was like a stem, my mouth a red flower. It faded pale white over the years, but if you look careful it still weaves its way through the lines on my face. In the tender evening light even those wrinkles diminish but the scar remains. It’s the way of the evening, when form and time lose shape.

The Tea House used to be called the Woodcutter’s Cottage, built for the man who cut wood for Petal’s End back when the whole place was heated with wood and coal. I don’t recall his name. But when I was a child it was called the Tea House because people came to take tea with Grampie. A house takes on the way of its dwellers. For years I thought it was just a social thing, but later I learned that when they came with their teacups and their fearful sad eyes they came for dark reasons.

It’s blistering that last day of school as I stare at Ma’s car, smoke hanging in the air. The valley offers no relief, not like over on the bay shore in Lupin Cove where huge tides sweep in cool breezes and the stark sun disappears inside mists and clouds. Then with a puff the haze will clear and unfurl an endless banner of blue sky streaming overhead. I sit dumbly on the steps finishing my lunch like I’m expecting Ma, but I am not expecting her. It’s not the car she crashed when I was three. This is the sixth car since that one. Finally, the rusty door flies open and out she lunges. She’s done up for the weather in a tight summer dress with a black bra hanging out, and she comes strutting over in her high heels with long hair piled fantastically high, dark Mosher eyes all lined, big long lashes, red lips a line of sunset cutting through her cheeks. Fifty-seven years old. Seeing her from a distance, it does seem time screeched to a stop for her. She never got fat like lots of ladies, not even having twelve kids. But up close Ma is a skeleton. Her slinky walk is how she keeps her balance in them castle-high shoes, hips swaying side to side. Her face is lined from too many smokes, too much booze, from my brother dying. She looks like she walked out of the past, in what were once her best out-on-the-town clothes, now faded and dated, dyed black hair frizzing out in all directions. Ma had two kinds of outfits. Her working clothes, simple cotton dresses she sewed herself, for picking fruit and vegetables and cleaning houses. And her going-out clothes, the tight, sexy ones accompanied by heavy perfume and makeup. She wore her going-out clothes for weddings, funerals, picnics, parties and bars.

Ma sees me right away, not that it would have been any better if she’d gone strutting and swaying all over the school property singing out
Fancy Mosher, Fancy Mosher, fucking little Fancy Mosher
. She’s holding her own, flouncing toward the stairs, but she’s teetering real bad. Ma stops to light up another cigarette and lets out a horrendous cough and I know she is back on the gin again, singing her gin songs, the rattling cough and throat clearing. The only
time she yells is when she’s drunk. Near the bottom of the steps there is some dirt and grass where her heels have speared the lawn and I hear the familiar click click as she comes up the stairs, her cheap sunglasses covering her eyes.

I see Art coming along then, rambling at first, but the second he spots Ma he breaks into a run. She continues up the steps, clinging to the railing, and stands in front of me with her hands on her hips. Art comes up behind her, not sure what to do. He’s winded. It’s hard to catch your breath in thick clammy air.

Ma lifts up her sunglasses and rubs her eyes, liner smudged, crooked. You could tell how much gin by how straight the line, how smudged the shadow. She must have been crying all the way down the mountain and into the valley. Ma knows better than to come here. Loretta already told her to stay away from me for the summer, on account of what Ma did in early spring. Yet here she is, only two months later, tap tap tapping to see where she can get in. I rest my eyes on the sky. It’s no panic for me, Ma like this. It is her normal state. It’s just that her man, Ronnie, usually reins her in. Where could he be? I start humming.

Ma opens her mouth and a slow purr comes out of her. “Fancy, you got a sweet voice, and you sound like one of them red birds your Grampie loved so.” She takes another wobbly step. “You’re special to me, Fancy. You know you are, don’t ya, Honeysuckle? I waited so long for you, and you were born when the air was sugar fancy, flowers as far as I could see, my summer baby. The rest of them was all born when it was cold. But not you. You were born in the heat. Early in the morning when the sky was on fire and the air was so humid it was crawling in the windows.” She gives a burp and a laugh comes out of her mouth as she runs her hand up and down the railing, her fingernails tinkling on the metal. She sits down right close to me, playing with the curls falling down by her eyes as she did when she was young, but the gesture’s not beguiling no more. She strokes my knee. “Today is
your day, Honeysuckle. You are the twelfth-born. I counted off them babies until I had you. John Lee was my first baby. Then two, three, four, five, six. You see, I knew about the story and the numbers. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. And they stopped coming. But oh, I waited. Yes, I did, I waited ten more years just for you. Your father, he said I tricked him, getting my fancy baby but not keeping him around. Isn’t that just like a man? A lonely man is an easy man. But I needed a twelfth because of the Mosher ways. You know what your grandfather could do with his teacups and paints. He could have helped me. But he said no, he would not talk to my baby boy. It wasn’t my fault, what happened.” Ma’s voice stops like she’s crashed into a cliff.

She sees me staring at her smeared makeup and whatever softness was in her voice slinks away.

“Don’t you look at me like that, Fancy. You know what those paintings were about.” She takes a deep breath and smiles so sweet I can feel the teeth rotting out of my head. Ma lurches up as though she suddenly remembered she needs to be somewhere even though she’s not sure where that might be. Art’s behind her with his hands out, in case she falls. Her arm drapes on the railing and she slouches back. She won’t be upright for much longer.

I don’t know what she’s speaking of, going on about my grandfather and whatever shameful secret she thinks I’m in on. Grampie was a painter. Folk art, they call it. Grampie had a garden and he cut firewood and trapped animals. He kept bees and made wildflower honey. And for as long as he was able he made turpentine and furniture polish as his father did, to bring in extra. But above all else he was an artist. Everyone knew that. He painted pictures on pieces of board and driftwood and stones, anything flat. People came from all over to have him make one for them. They’d bring a teacup, and I thought they was doing a trade for his art. He called his pictures
portraits
, some smiling, some looking right crazy, some woebegone, some tired, some asleep. Pictures of people sitting in
gardens, and at tables, and on occasion there was nature surrounding them. Sometimes there was an object: a cane, a truck, a chair, a coin, a building far behind. Grampie said he painted what was in their eyes, what came off their tongues. When he wasn’t painting portraits he was painting on the walls of the house.

In his bedroom he had a painting of my grandmother. It was his favourite. Her wrinkled, smiling face he treasured so. Bright sparkling sunlight surrounded her as she sat under the pines, blowing him a kiss like she did when they went into the forest to collect berries. I loved to stand in the doorway and look at her. Just after she gave birth to my mother she got a terrible joint disease and she became bent and twisted, except that gentle look. My grandmother died long before I came to live with Grampie, from her illness wearing her down over many years. She was his heart’s song, he called her. After she died they found him at the kitchen table with the teapot, the cups set, staring at her empty chair like he was waiting for her.

One of my earliest memories was Ma saying Grampie should put advertisements for his portraits in the paper. Not everyone could do what he did, she said, because he had a rare gift. Grampie said that was ridiculous and most people wouldn’t want one glimpse if they knew where his inspiration really came from. He shushed her, the way he would, waving his hand slow through the air, like he was clearing smoke.
For some people, Marilyn Mosher, there is no point in seeing, and you are one of them people
. There was no more talk of advertising. After he retired from gardening in Evermore, the garden at Petal’s End, Grampie made enough to get by with his portraits. He gave up the bees and collecting pine sap for turpentine and just did his art. He wouldn’t charge a price for the paintings and he wouldn’t make an appointment for anyone. People would leave an offering in a wooden box he had on the table, and they’d leave the teacups they had brought. The people never stopped coming.

The sign was on the house by the door, and he had painted it in clean black lines, with fuchsia morning glories coiled around the letters.

But the narrow lane to the house snaked through the forest, with no number or sign, so if you didn’t know where to turn, you would never find Samuel Mosher. When someone did find us, he’d shoo me away. It was confidential, he said, giving someone a painting.
Some things are private, Fancy
, Grampie would say,
and privacy is to be respected. All the problems in the world come when we go against the natural order respect lays out
. Most people who came left happy with their paintings, but some left crying. Grampie would stand with me on the verandah at the front of the house, and we’d wave as they drove away. He’d glance in that mirror by the front door as we went back into the Tea House.

As Ma got older she wanted to be like her father, for he was peaceful despite what he had seen. And he was able to make peace for others. She was unquiet, angry she never saw the world. Grampie never wanted to leave Lupin Cove again. Aside from the war, he spent his entire life here. He told her you could find the world in a teacup if you took the time to look, that there was no need to travel. Ma said she never got the second chance she deserved, that she’d spent her life being judged, tripping on it each step of the way, slaving for others. You could only talk to her on her terms. Ma was furious Grampie couldn’t fix things. Or wouldn’t fix things. She kept waiting. But he had the nerve to die on her.