Vinegar Hill (5 page)

M
ary-Margaret shoos the children away and lies down on the daybed. She twists Mama's ring round and round on her pinky finger. There is magic in this ring, she knows, even though Father Bork refuses to bless it, warning of superstition. But once, she stopped by the church at midday when she knew it would be empty. She dipped the ring into the holy-water font and wore it on her finger as it dried. When she knelt to light a candle, the flame flared high, and Mary-Margaret saw Mama's face as clearly as if she were standing there. There were no signs of torture in Mama's eyes; her hair was unsinged, her lips moist and pink. Even though she knows Mama must be burning in Hell, Mary-Margaret takes comfort from that image.

She gets up and goes to sit at the piano, places her fingers on the keys. Arthritis has stiffened her hands; they are bulbous, ugly, she does not recognize them. As a girl, she had the most beautiful hands. Winter nights, she rubbed them with butter to keep them supple and strong. In the warm summer months, she walked three and a half miles into Holly's Field to sit in the organ loft at Saint Michael's, where she closed her eyes and played whatever her mind
could hear, the world around her tumbling from her shoulders like a robe.

The piano had been a gift from Mama the year after Salome left home for good, when Mary-Margaret turned fifteen. Mama bought it used from a family in Cedarton, and though the pedals stuck, all the keys worked except for three. Mornings, after she finished helping in the kitchen, Mary-Margaret carried her little gray cat into the living room, settled her warmly into her lap, and played the piano until it was time to fetch dinner to her father and older brothers in the field. She hated reading music and memorized things quickly—the notes looked ugly and hard, like goat droppings. Nothing Mary-Margaret saw on the page looked anything like the way the music really felt. When she played, she saw past the ragged landscapes that were the lives of her mother and sister and the neighboring women; she peered into a world of color and sound, of finishing schools and glorious cathedrals, a world where Mama promised her that one day she would go. She would not be the wife of a farmer, bound to his whims and the whims of God's seasons, the random disasters and strokes of good luck that brought children and drought, sickness and the occasional windfall of cash from a bumper crop. She would not lose her teeth to childbirth, her eyesight to the summer sun's glare. She would not lose her music to a man's desire for land and sons.

Now, she plays a few minor chords, hums the beginning of a melody. But she has no ear for the music anymore; her soul is wide and plain as a field of winter wheat. The Lord giveth and He taketh away. For many years, Fritz kept the piano stored in the barn, and by the time he allowed it into the house, Mama was dead and Mary-Margaret's fingers had forgotten how to play beyond the simple notes, the movement of her fingers.

Goddamn caterwauling. Cat in heat
.

Cat would make a better mother than you
.

She has imagined Fritz's death many times. Sometimes at night, she lies awake, staring at him across the space between their beds, thinking of how it would be to fetch the straight razor from beside the bathroom sink, the scissors from Mama's old sewing basket. After Mama died Mary-Margaret chopped up a panful of iris leaves and simmered them on the wood stove until all that was left was a caramel-colored liquid. It would have been easy, then, to pour it into his coffee. It would be easy, even now, to cradle the razor in her hand, sweep it hard across his throat as if she were slicing the sour thick skin of a rutabaga.

Frightened, she slides her mother-of-pearl pillbox out of the pocket of her housecoat. Thinking about something can make it happen, which is why having such thoughts is a sin. She taps out two pills, swallows them dry, then closes her eyes. She is not brave the way Mama was brave. She cannot defy God's law. When Mary-Margaret dies, her unsoiled soul will go up to Heaven, kept from Mama's soul forever.

“Talk to me, Mary-May,” Father Bork says when he stops by on his monthly visit. He uses the name Mama used when he'd come to Mama's house for tea and Mary-Margaret, wearing her nicest dress, would carry it to him in a pink china cup.
Mary-May, get Father his sugar. Mary-May, tell Father your kitty-cat's name
. “There's been something troubling your mind for years. I'm your confessor, child. I'm here to help.” But Mary-Margaret never talks about Ann, although she sometimes cries and clutches Father Bork's hand. It embarrasses her to have him see her come to this. She wonders what he thinks when he looks at her now, an old woman weeping into a crumpled pink handkerchief. She wonders what James thinks, what Mitch thinks when he looks down from Heaven. She does not let herself wonder about the other two, who are floating
in limbo between the saved and the banished, unbaptized, without the slightest hope of rest, comfort, home.

It was Pa who forced her to marry in 1932, the year she turned twenty-four.
I ain't keeping no old maids
, he said. Francis Grier was a hired man's son, the youngest of fourteen children. He was known as a hard, strong worker, and when Pa offered him Mary-Margaret, he said he'd agree if she came with forty acres of good land.
We got ourselves a fella knows what he wants
, Pa told Mama.
Best kind of man you can find
. It was the only time in her life that Mary-Margaret saw her mother cry.

She was married two months later, and after the brief wedding service, Mama slipped a prayer card into her hand.
Pray this tonight, when you need to
, she said, and during the long, silent ride in the wagon back to Fritz's shanty, Mary-Margaret kept it pressed to her heart. When they arrived she went into the tiny bedroom and put on the white lace nightgown Mama and Salome had made for her.
You do what he tells you
, Mama had said, but when Fritz came in, his hands dark with wagon grease, he ripped the pretty gown from her chest to her knees.
I don't like none of that
, he said. That night, she chanted Mama's prayer so deep inside herself that Fritz, no matter what he might do, couldn't truly find her.

Lord, help me to accept what I cannot change. Lord, help me to accept this
.

Three weeks later, Pa was gored by a neighbor's bull, and before he died he willed the farm and everything else he owned to Fritz. Fritz and Mary-Margaret moved into the big stone farmhouse, and Fritz told Mama she could stay if she did not interfere.
You raised up a goddamn lady
, he told her,
now I got to fix her for a wife
. And Mama held back, though her face flushed when Mary-Margaret appeared in the morning for breakfast with an eye swollen shut, an
arm in a makeshift sling. Nights, Mary-Margaret prayed silently as the hands moved over her body, forcing open her jaws, squeezing her breasts until she gasped, but, praise to God, she never made a sound that might have trickled through the walls to the narrow room where Mama slept. Sometimes, though, she was unable to hide her shame.
Get out
, he'd tell Mama, lifting Mary-Margaret's skirts as she stood washing laundry in the galvanized tub. At times like that, he liked to look into Mama's face and see all the things there that she wished to do to him, but, he thought, dared not. Over the years, the color of Mama's hatred turned red as blood; Mary-Margaret could see it like a haze around her head, but Fritz, like his sons, could not see color, could not understand what it might mean.

When she opens her eyes, Jimmy's little girl is standing there, one foot stepping on the other. The pills Mary-Margaret swallowed make her feel soft and warm, as though a hand were trailing down her spine. She sees herself at Amy's age, with lovely slim hands and hair in curls. Mama taught Salome how to make those curls by wrapping Mary-Margaret's hair in bits of rags. Salome herself had stringy hair, no good for curling. Now Mary-Margaret sees Salome in this girl's straight hair, in her close-together eyes and stubby lashes. She feels repulsed by this little girl the way she always felt repulsed by Salome. The smell of Salome when they slept side by side in the tiny bed Pa made for them; the dribbling sound of her snores.
Common
Salome, yet it was Salome the teachers admired. It was Salome who dreamed dreams that always came true, mystifying even Mama. But Mary-Margaret was the beautiful one, the one who heard music in everything, the one who had made up her mind she would be different from Salome and her mother and any other woman she had ever known.

“Can we have some bread and butter if we eat it at the counter?” Amy says.

“Such an ugly little girl.” Mary-Margaret shakes her head and fingers her soft blue curls, not realizing she has spoken aloud.

E
llen and James sleep in the front bedroom, a small room carpeted in gold, with gold curtains that hang in the windows as stiffly as paintings. The bed sprawls almost to the door, with a thin brown dresser wedged against the wall. Above the bed hangs a crucifix draped with braided palm fronds saved from many years of Palm Sundays. The eyes of Christ appear half open. His spindly hands are clenched into fists. He stares across their bodies, His gaze falling on the coffee table at the foot of the bed, where a blue plaster statue of Mary opens her arms to embrace the air.

James punches his pillow into the shape of a mushroom and lets his head fall into it, a sudden release, like letting a suitcase drop. When Ellen touches his shoulder, he jumps. “Cold hands,” he says. “Don't.” He rolls over on his side, facing her, the sheets clutched up under his chin. “If you think they'll let you pay for a real tree when they have a perfectly good
free
one in the basement,” he says, “you don't know them at all.”

“Would you eat an artificial turkey at Thanksgiving?” she asks, trying to tease him.

“That's silly,” he says seriously. “People don't eat plastic. But there are advantages to an artificial tree. Pa's right—it won't wilt. It won't drop needles or drip sap. It's not a fire hazard.”

“It's not a Christmas tree, either.”

“I remember when they bought it—must have been twenty years ago. It was before anybody had heard of an artificial tree. Everyone came over to see it and they pinched it and asked how much it cost. Artificial trees look real, Ellie. You can't tell the difference.”

“They don't smell real.”

“We can get some spray, some room fresher, whatever you call it.” He relaxes a little, the sheet pulling away, his bare chest smooth and hairless as a child's. “Everybody came to see it,” he says. “Mother had me and Mitch serve them store cookies. The next year, they all got artificial trees, but we had the first one.”

He strokes Ellen's foot absentmindedly with his, and she knows he is thinking of that plastic tree, the one his neighbors and relatives admired so long ago. He wants to be a teenaged boy again, trailing behind his mother with a plate of cookies: not common, homemade cookies, but cookies bought at a store.
Offer them a cookie, Jimmy
. The old people in town still talk about what a sweet boy he was, so unlike his brother, so unlike his father.
Mama's boy
.

“But how long has that tree been down there?” Ellen asks.

“It's an
artificial
tree, Ellen. It's not like it's going to rot or anything. A live Christmas tree that's just going to die anyway costs ten bucks. We don't have the money, that we can buy every kind of thing we want.” His foot against hers is frenzied; abruptly, he pulls it away.

“This isn't about money,” she says, but she knows from the angry flutter of his eyelids that this is the end of the discussion. She turns out the light and stares up at the dark ceiling; it gradually becomes visible, the white spackling pale and irregular as the surface
of the moon. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Tonight, Fritz finally agreed to let them put up the tree, provided there would be no hassle, no commotion.
I seen enough of this nonsense to last me a lifetime
, he'd told James.
Just cause you still got the appetite for it don't mean I should suffer, too
. And James seemed to grow smaller, his shoulders lifting with each careful breath like someone who has been crying for a long time.
Don't worry, Pa
, he said,
we won't bother you
.

Thinking of this, Ellen moves closer to James, pressing her forehead against the cool, damp skin of his upper arm. He doesn't pull away, but he doesn't respond; it's as if she's falling asleep in a room of her own, something she's never done. She slept with her mother from the time her father died until she left home for school at seventeen. Even now, when she wakes up in the night, she sometimes thinks she's back in Mom's room with the dog lying between them and the cats braided together at the foot of the bed. In winter, frost angels played on the windowpanes; in summer, Mom left the window open wide so the scent from the mock orange tree seeped into the sheets. During the night, neither awake nor asleep, Ellen would reach out with her foot to touch Mom's leg, which was always there, solid and serene, and Mom, without waking, would turn toward Ellen and pat her face with her warm, rough hand. Mornings after Mom got up, there were always sisters' beds to climb into, damp and warm and slightly sweet from the soap they used in their hair. “Aw, Ellie, it's so early,” they'd moan, folding her into their arms. She'd doze for an extra minute or two until Mom's voice rang up the stairwell:
Girls! You got breakfast and chores, now, don't make me come up there after you
.

But whenever Ellen reaches out for James, he's ready with some excuse. He's ticklish; her hands are too cold; he's tired; he wants to be left alone. She tries to remind herself that, for James, being
touched was often an act of anger, a slap, a shove, a beating. The artificial tree was a bright moment in all that.
Perhaps
, Ellen thinks,
I'm the one who's acting selfishly. I have so many good memories of my childhood, who am I to deny him this? It might even draw all of us together in a way no live tree could. James and his parents can remember better times, and the children and I will become part of that memory
.

“It's okay about the tree,” Ellen says before she realizes he is sleeping. He begins to snore, a light, musical sound that seems to come from somewhere far away.

 

The next day, the children sit at the kitchen table stringing popcorn and cranberries for the artificial tree. Ellen is busy stuffing the goose, one from her sister Miriam's flock, that they're having for Christmas dinner. Amy cuts a star out of cardboard, paints it gold, sprinkles it with glitter. She has braided her hair clumsily with red and green ribbons; Bert, not to be outdone, knots a piece of ribbon into his own short hair. The decorations are laid out on the counter: clothespin soldiers, yarn dolls, candy wrapped in tinfoil. Drying on a cookie sheet are stars made of salt-and-flour dough. The color of the dough is light gray, almost blue. Later, they'll paint the stars red and gold, purple and green, even though Mary-Margaret says there are no such things as purple and green stars.

She sits in a chair by the kitchen window, a red flannel scarf wrapped around her neck, sucking on horehound candies. A granny-square afghan covers her knees. Periodically, she sighs. Mary-Margaret is always catching a cold, but Ellen has never known her to have one. She doesn't want to help Ellen fix Christmas dinner. She doesn't want to make Christmas decorations. She doesn't want to watch the game with Fritz and James in the living room. Now and then, she'll turn to comment on whatever it is
Ellen is doing.
Mama always beat her eggs up two-handed
, she says, or
Mama checked her cakes with a knife, not a fork
. Mary-Margaret's mother, Ann, has been dead for many years; still, they are having Christmas dinner tonight, on Christmas Eve, because that's the way Ann did it.

Mary-Margaret gets up to part the curtains and peer out at the yard. “Snow,” she says, the way someone else might say
death
or
grief
. Perhaps she is remembering Christmas with her mother and father and brothers and sister, all of whom are dead, except Salome. Salome is spending Christmas Eve at the rectory with the Ladies of the Altar Society. The Society sews the church linens, launders them, grows flowers for the altar, makes quilts for the missions, organizes bake sales, vacuums and dusts the church once a month. For a slice of ham and a dollop of instant potatoes, Father Bork will buy another year of hard labor, Ellen thinks. But then she is ashamed: it is Christmas Eve. She apologizes silently as she ties the drumsticks of the goose together with thread, rubs the skin with margarine.

“It's too early to put in that goose,” Mary-Margaret says, sniffling.

“Do you think so?” Ellen says, keeping her voice level as she sticks it in the oven. She's known how to cook a goose since she was ten and her mother slipped in the barn, breaking both her wrists. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the next day Ellen and Julia and Heidi cooked the meal as Mom directed them from her chair, her wrists held in place by heavy splints.

“Mama made goose so it would fall off the bone.”

“How many geese did you keep?” Ellen asks to distract her.

“Oh, two, three dozen. Nasty things. Mean. Ate up the lawn. In spring, you'd step off the porch into muck.”

She sits back down and rocks, lost in thought. Remembering the
geese? Her chin nods to her chest, her hands clutch the afghan. Sometimes Ellen wants to make Mary-Margaret understand that in so many ways they are the same, that their lives were decided for them by forces they did not recognize in time. But when Mary-Margaret looks at Ellen, she sees her son's failure to marry well. When she sees Ellen's first child, she sees a girl who can give her nothing. She doesn't look up again until James comes into the kitchen, his cheeks flushed from watching the Packers.

“Who's winning?” Ellen says, even though she really doesn't care.

“Not us,” he says. “This looks very nice,” he tells the kids. Bert nods shyly; Amy shrugs. Ellen can feel how they are nervous, wondering what he wants, this strange man who is their father. But today he is trying; Ellen can see how hard he's trying in the way he stands, shifting foot to foot.

“Jimmy, that bird'll be all dried out if she puts it in now,” Mary-Margaret says.

“Smells good,” James says, not looking at his mother.

Ellen asks quickly, “When are you bringing up the tree?”

“Oh, soon,” he says. “When you're done with this, I guess,” and he gestures vaguely at the ornaments, the twisted red and white ropes of cranberries and popcorn.

“We're almost done,” Ellen says. “I want to leave time for a nap after supper so we're all wide awake for Midnight Mass.”

“What kind of tree is it?” Amy suddenly asks James.

“What?”

“You know, like is it a fir, or a Scotch pine?”

James considers this. “I guess you'll have to tell me when you see it,” he says. “Maybe it's just a Christmas tree.”

“Mama made goose so it fell off the bone,” Mary-Margaret says. “This goose will be dried right up.”

“I think it will be fine,” James says softly. He kisses Ellen's
cheek, surprising her, then heads back into the living room. Mary-Margaret sulks, wrapping the red flannel scarf more tightly around her neck, but she doesn't say anything else. After James is gone, Amy rolls her eyes and says, “There's no such thing as a
Christmas
tree.”

“Use your imagination,” Ellen says.

But Amy rolls her eyes a second time. Lately, she's been studying James, looking for signs of weakness, for chances to prove him wrong. She's at an age where she is figuring out that her parents are not perfect; she resents it, resents them, but it is James whom she blames. It frightens Ellen sometimes to think of Amy as a ten-year-old girl, almost a teenager, certainly beginning to emerge as an individual person. She watches Amy work with the scissors, searching for clues that will tell her what Amy will be like when she's grown, eight Christmases from now. She wonders what all of them will be like, as she scours the countertop with bleach, thinking of James's unexpected kiss.

During halftime, James goes into the basement. He's down there for a long time before they hear him curse. His voice travels up the heating vent and echoes in the living room as if he were right there. “
Got
-dammit!” he says. The kids giggle and run downstairs. Mary-Margaret giggles too, sneaks looks at Ellen; her boy is being naughty. She sits in her parlor chair by the window in her pink chenille robe, her hair freshly curled, rinsed the color of the faintest blue sky. Beside her, Fritz sprawls in his La-Z-Boy. When Ellen moves the end table from between their chairs to make room for the tree, his sock feet stick straight up like exclamations.

“Where the hell am I going to set my coffee?” he says. “How the hell can I see to read without the lamp?”

“The Christmas tree will give off light,” she says. “Or I can set the lamp up somewhere else, if you want.”

Balloons fill the TV screen; the crowd cheers. It is time for the
halftime show. Amy and Herbert race back up from the basement, and Ellen hears the sound of metal being dragged across concrete, then the
thump
-rest-
thump
-rest as James jerks the tree up the stairs.

“
Got
-dammit!”

“How's it look?” she asks the kids.

Herbert says, “Big.”

Amy says, “Green.”

“Where the hell am I going to set my paper?” Fritz says, just as James and the tree burst out of the stairwell in an explosion of painted bark and plastic needles. The tree is a vivid, neon green, strangled in wide ropes of gold and silver tinsel. Red glass balls glisten like wounds. The angel at the top is missing a wing, and one of her eyes is askew.

“It's already decorated,” Ellen says.

“Less work this way,” James pants. “You just bring it up, no hassles.”

“Oh,” she says, and he jams it between Fritz and Mary-Margaret's chairs, in the space where the end table used to be. It is so tall that the angel is pushed flat against the ceiling. The smell of the basement fills the room: moist concrete, mildew.

“Some of the ornaments are broken,” Amy says.

“Look, there's a spider,” Herbert says. “Yuk.”

“There's another one,” Amy says.

“No problem,” James says. “We'll just pick off the broken ornaments, and as for the spiders…”