The Stone Angel (7 page)

Then an address and a phone number. Quietly I lay the paper down, my hands dry and quiet on its dry pages. My throat, too, is dry, and my mouth. As I brush my fingers over my own wrist, the skin seems too white after the sunburned years, and too dry, powdery as blown dust when the rains failed, flaking with dryness as an old bone will flake and chalk, left out in a sun that grinds bone and flesh and earth to dust as though in a mortar of fire with a pestle of crushing light.

Up flames the pain now, and I am speared once more, the blade driving under my ribs, the heavy larded flesh no shield against it, for it attacks craftily, from the inside. Breath goes. I cannot breathe. I am held, fixed and fluttering, like an earthworm impaled by children on the ferociously unsharp hook of a safety pin. I am unable to draw breath at all, and my quick panic is apart from me and almost seen, like the masks that leer out of the dark on Hallowe’en, stopping the young in their tracks and freezing their mouths in the “O” of a soundless wail. Can a body hold to this life more than an instant with empty lungs? It passes through my mind the way that John in his second year used to hold his tantrum breath, and how I pleaded and prayed to him as though he were some infant and relentless Jesus, until Bram, angry at
us both, slapped him and made him draw breath in a yell. If his small frame could live unfed by air for that seeming eternity, so can my bulk. I will not fall. I will not. I grip the table edge, and when I cease to strain for air, of itself it comes. My constricted heart releases me and the pain subsides, drawing away and out of me so slowly and tenderly I almost expect my blood to follow it, as though the blade were visible.

Now I have forgotten why it came upon me. My fingers straighten the newspapers, folding each section tidily, the habit of a lifetime, nothing strewn around the house. Then I see the ink mark, and the word in heavy print. MOTHER.

Here is Doris, plumply sleek in her brown rayon, puffing and sighing like a sow in labor. I push the papers away, but she has seen. She knows I know. What will she say? She will not be at a loss. Not her. Not Doris. She has enough gall for ten. If she tries warbling sweet and gentle, I will not spare her.

She stares scaredly at me, her face flushed and perspiring. She has an unpleasant mannerism. She breathes noisily and adenoidally when agitated. She rasps now like a coping saw. Then she tried to turn the moment as though it could be flicked like an uninteresting page.

“Gracious, Mr. Troy stayed longer than I thought. I got to hustle with the dinner. Thank goodness, the roast’s in, at least. Did you have a nice visit with him?”

“Rather a stupid man, I thought. He should get a plate. His teeth are so bad. I didn’t catch his breath—just as well, I wouldn’t wonder.”

Doris takes offense, purses mauve lips, flings on an apron, scrapes carrots with ferocity.

“He’s a busy man, Mother. The number of parishioners
he’s got—you’d scarcely believe it. It was nice of him to spare the time.”

She turns a narrowed glance on me, wily as a baby now, knowingly twining its parent.

“Your flowered dress looked nice.”

I will not be appeased. Yet I glance down at myself all the same, thinking she may be right, and see with surprise and unfamiliarity the great swathed hips. My waist was twenty inches when I wed.

It was not work that did it, nor even the food, although potatoes grew so well on the river bottom land of the Shipley place, especially during times when they fetched no price to speak of in the town. It was not the children, either, only the two and ten years apart. No. I will maintain until my dying day it was the lack of a foundation garment. What did Bram know of it? We had catalogues—I could have ordered corselettes. The illustrations, considered daring then, pictured swan-necked ladies, shown only from the hips up, of course, encased in lace, boned to a nicety, indrawn waists slender as a wrist, faces aloof but confident, as though they were unaware they faced the world clad only in their underclothes. I used to leaf and ponder, but never did I buy. He would only laugh or scowl.

“The girls don’t go in for them things, do they, Hagar?”

Of course his girls did not. Jess and Gladys were like heifers, like lumps of unrendered fat. We had precious little money—better, he thought, to spend it on his schemes. Honey, it was once. We would surely make our fortunes. Didn’t the white and yellow clover teem all around? It did, but something else grew as well, some poisonous flower we never saw, hidden perhaps from the
daylight, shielded by foxtails that waved their barbed furry brushes in his pastures, or concealed by the reeds around the yellow-scummed slough, some blossom of burdock or nightshade, siren-scented to bees, no doubt, and deadly. His damned bees sickened and for the most part died, looking like scattered handfuls of shriveled raisins in the hives. A few survived, and Bram kept them for years, knowing full well they frightened me. He could plunge his hairy arms among them, even when they swarmed, and they never stung. I don’t know why, except he felt no fear.

“Mother—are you all right? Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Doris’s voice. How long have I been standing here with lowered head, twiddling with the silken stuff that covers me? Now I am mortified, apologetic, and cannot for a moment recollect what it was I held against her. The house, of course. They mean to sell my house. What will become of all my things?

“I don’t want Marvin to sell the house, Doris.”

She frowns, perplexed. Then I remember. It was more than the house. The newspaper remains on the kitchen table. Silverthreads. Only the best. Remember the loving care she lavished.

“Doris—I won’t go there. That place. Oh, you know all right. You know what I mean, my girl. No use to shake your head. Well, I won’t. The two of you can move out. Go ahead and move right out. Yes, you do that. I’ll stay here in my house. Do you hear me? Eh?”

“Now, Mother, don’t go and get yourself all upset. How could you manage here alone? It’s out of the question. Now, please. You go and sit down in the living-room. We’ll say no more about it just yet. If you get all worked
up, you’re certain to fall, and Marv won’t be home for half an hour.”

“I’m not worked up a bit!” Is it my voice, raucous and deep, shouting? “I only want to tell you—”

“I can’t lift you if you fall,” she says. “I simply cannot do it any more.”

I turn and walk away, wishing to be haughty, but hideously hitting the edge of the dining-room table, joggling the cut-glass rose bowl she uses now, although it is mine. She runs, rejoicing in her ill fortune, catches the bowl and my elbow, guides me as though I were stone blind. We gain the living-room, and as I lower myself to the chesterfield, the windy prison of my bowels belches air, sulphurous and groaning. I am to be spared nothing, it appears. I cannot speak, for anger. Doris is solicitous.

“The laxative didn’t work?”

“I’m all right. I’m all right. Stop fussing over me, Doris, for pity’s sake.”

Back she goes to the kitchen, and I’m alone. My things are all around me. Marvin and Doris think of them as theirs, theirs to keep or sell, as they choose, just as they regard the house as theirs, squatters’ rights after these years of occupation. With Doris it is greed. She never had much as a child, I know, and when they first came here, to be with me, she eyed the furniture and bric-à-brac like a pouch-faced gopher eyeing acorns, eager to nibble. But it is not greed, I think, with Marvin. Such a stolid soul. His dreams are not of gold and silver, if he dreams at all. Or is it the reverse—does he ever waken? He lives in a dreamless sleep. He sees my things as his only through long acquaintance.

But they are mine. How could I leave them? They
support and comfort me. On the mantelpiece is the knobbled jug of blue and milky glass that was my mother’s, and beside it, in a small oval frame of gilt, backed with black velvet, a daguerreotype of her, a spindly and anxious girl, rather plain, ringleted stiffly. She looks so worried that she will not know what to do, although she came of good family and ought not to have had a moment’s hesitation about the propriety of her ways. But still she peers perplexed out of her little frame, wondering how on earth to please. Father gave me the jug and picture when I was a child, and even then it seemed so puzzling to me that she’d not died when either of the boys was born, but saved her death for me. When he said “your poor mother,” the moisture would squeeze out from the shaggy eyelid, and I marveled that he could achieve it at will, so suitable and infinitely touching to the matrons of the town, who found a tear for the female dead a reassuring tribute to thankless motherhood. Even should they die in childbed, some male soul would weep years after. Wonderful consolation. I used to wonder what she’d been like, that docile woman, and wonder at her weakness and my awful strength. Father didn’t hold it against me that it had happened so. I know, because he told me. Perhaps he thought it was a fair exchange, her life for mine.

The gilt-edged mirror over the mantel is from the Currie house. It used to hang in the downstairs hall, where the air was astringent with mothballs hidden under the blue roses of the carpet, and each time I passed it I would glance hastily, not wanting to be seen looking, and wonder why Dan and Matt inherited her daintiness while I was big-boned and husky as an ox.

Yet there’s the picture of me at twenty. Doris wanted
to take it down, but Marvin wouldn’t let her—that was a curious thing, now I come to think of it. I was a handsome girl, a handsome girl, no doubt of that. A pity I didn’t know it then. Not beautiful, I admit, not that china figurine look some women have, all gold and pink fragility, a wonder their corsets don’t snap their sparrow bones. Handsomeness lasts longer, I will say that.

Sometimes these delicate-seeming women can turn out to be quite robust after all, though. Matt’s wife Mavis was one of those whose health had always been precarious. She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, and was thought to have a weak heart. Yet that winter when the influenza was so bad, she nursed Matt and never caught it herself. She stayed by him, I’ll say that for her. I no longer went in to town very often, so I didn’t even know Matt was ill until Aunt Dolly came out to the farm one day to tell me he had died the night before.

“He went quietly,” she said. “He didn’t fight his death, as some do. They only make it harder for themselves. Matt seemed to know there was no help for it, Mavis said. He didn’t struggle to breathe, or try to hang on. He let himself slip away.”

I found this harder to bear than his death, even. Why hadn’t he writhed, cursed, at least grappled with the thing? We talked of Matt, then, Aunt Dolly and myself, and it was then she told me why he’d saved his money as a child. I’ve often wondered why one discovers so many things too late. The jokes of God.

I went to see Mavis. She was dressed in black, and seemed so young to be widowed. When I tried to tell her how much he’d mattered to me, she was cold. At first I thought it was because she didn’t believe me. But no. It was not my affection for him that she found hard to
believe in. She sat there telling me over and over how fond she’d been of him, how fond he’d been of her.

“If only you’d had children,” I said, meaning it in sympathy, “you’d have had something of him left.”

Mavis’s eyes changed, became like blue sapphires, clear and hard.

“It wasn’t surprising that we didn’t,” she said, “although I wanted them so much.” She began to cry then, and spoke retchingly through her tears. “I didn’t mean to say that. Please, don’t tell anyone. Oh, I know you wouldn’t—why do I even ask? I’m not myself.”

I could find no words that would reach deeply enough. After a moment she composed herself.

“You’d best go now, Hagar,” she said. “I’ve had all I can take for now. I’m glad you come, though. Don’t think I’m not.”

As I was leaving, Mavis touched a hand to the fur muff I was carrying.

“I never heard him speak harshly of you,” she said. “Even when your father talked that way, Matt never did. He didn’t dispute what your father said, but he didn’t agree, either. He’d just not say anything one way or another.”

A year later Mavis married Alden Cates and went to live on the farm, and in the years that followed she bore him three youngsters and she raised Rhode Island Reds and took prizes at all the local poultry shows and grew plump as a pullet herself, so thank goodness fate deals a few decent cards sometimes.

Aunt Dolly thought that Father would want to make it up with me after Matt’s death. I wouldn’t go to the brick house in Manawaka, of course, but when Marvin was born I gave Aunt Dolly to understand that if Father
wanted to come out to the Shipley place and see his grandson, I’d have no objections. He didn’t come, though. Perhaps he didn’t feel as though Marvin were really his grandson. I almost felt that way myself, to tell the truth, only with me it was even more. I almost felt as though Marvin weren’t my son.

There’s the plain brown pottery pitcher, edged with anemic blue, that was Bram’s mother’s, brought from some village in England and very old. I’d forgotten it was here. Who got it out? Tina, of course, She likes it, for some reason. It always looked like an ordinary milk pitcher to me. Tina says it’s valuable. Each to his taste, and my granddaughter, though so dear to me, has common tastes, a little, I think, a legacy no doubt from her mother. Yet Doris never cared a snap about that pitcher, I’m bound to admit. Well, there’s no explaining tastes, and ugliness is pretty nowadays. Myself, I favor flowers, a leaf sprig or two, a measure of gracefulness in an ungainly world. I never could imagine the Shipley’s owning anything of account. But Tina’s fond of it—I’ll leave it to her. She ought to have it, for she was born a Shipley. I pray God she marries, although the Lord only knows where she’ll find a man who’ll bear her independence.