Tending to Grace Read online

  “Don’t you talk?”

  I look away. My stomach rises to my chest. I know what’s coming and tears puddle in my eyes. I swat at them, pretending a gnat has flown too close.

  The old woman pulls what looks like a sugar cube from deep within the pocket of her overalls. She doesn’t bother to pull off the blue lint, just pops it in her mouth. “Want one?”

  I shake my head. I want coffee. But I don’t say anything.

  “There are those who’d say a girl who don’t talk is a dimwit. Are you a dimwit?”

  I shake my head angrily and look at my crate of books and think about heading for the road. Or straight up that mountain.

  “You know what I say?” the old woman asks. “I say that when you got a voice, you damn well better tell the world who you are. Or somebody else will.”

  I take a deep breath and that’s all it takes for my throat to lock and I’m caught in the lonely place between what I want to say and what I can’t.

  “C-c-c-c-c...”

  I stop and turn away. My heart is a truck skidding crazily inside my chest. I gulp air, trying to loosen the silent knot that pulls tighter, tighter. The old woman does nothing but pull another sugar cube from her pocket and crunch noisily. “We’ll be bored as two pigs in a pen if I do all the talkin’ round here.”

  Let her see my voice, then. Let her see my colors. Let her see the awful wound in my throat. “C-c-c-c... C-c-cornelia.”

  My legs shake and I don’t bother to check if the old woman is a look-away because tears fall in front of my eyes now and I’m looking at my feet.

  14

  “Only God’s perfect,” the old woman says after a bit. “And sometimes I’m not sure about even that.” She chomps another sugar cube, then hoists my crate of books onto her hip, carries it up to her front step, and kicks the door open with a bang.

  “Come on in. I’ll get supper on.”

  The door latch swings dizzily on one nail as I walk into the house, first into a small hall and then into a kitchen, long and narrow, with beams on the ceiling and wide boards on the floor.

  “Sit down and rest a bit.” She points to a kitchen table in the middle of the room, hidden beneath an assortment of lunch dishes and breakfast dishes and probably the meal before that. I stack some of the dishes and push them to one side and wipe off a chair with the back of my hand and sit down and notice enough cobwebs on the ceiling to string a kite.

  “Well, let’s see now,” she says, unwrapping the binoculars from her neck and flopping them onto the table. “How ’bout some tea?”

  I don’t want tea, of course. I want coffee. But I don’t say anything.

  She fills a pot with water and sets it on an old white stove, twice the size of the one in our apartment. “You can call me Agatha.” She pulls a root from a pot on the counter and begins shaving slices from it with a large knife.

  “I’m the sister of your grandmother. I guess that’s right. But I don’t bother too much with relatives. Most of them bore me to death. My sister, she’s dead now, but when she was livin’, she couldn’t tell the upside of a turnip. How ’bout you?”

  I shrug, unsure if I’ve ever even seen a turnip.

  “Later on, if you decide on stayin’, I could use some gardenin’ help.” She puts the root slices into the pot on the stove.

  I don’t know what to say to that, not that I would say it anyway, so I watch her slice a round loaf of dark bread. She cuts three fat slices and puts them in front of me along with a jar of something brown and sticky. I wipe the dust off the edge of the plate with my thumb as she pulls a wheel of cheese from the refrigerator and cuts a pie-shaped slice and hands it to me. I slather the bread with a quarter inch of the sticky spread. I close my eyes and bite.

  Yeast and whole wheat flour mingle in my mouth with something sweet, heavy, and slightly bitter—not honey, but pretty good. The old woman looks over at me.

  “Molasses,” she says. “Ever had it before?”

  I shake my head.

  “Only one way to eat homemade bread—smothered in molasses.” She dips her finger in the jar and scoops out a lump of molasses and plunks it in her mouth.

  I check the cheese for mold and place a sliver on my tongue. A sharp, dry taste fills my mouth, much better than Velveeta.

  She pours two cups of tea and sits one down beside me. She slurps at hers like a child eating soup. I watch her and then, daring myself, take a slow sip. The tea tastes the way it smells, very close to root beer.

  “That’s sassafras,” she says. “It’s good for you.”

  It’s not coffee, though, I think. Agatha stops talking and we eat in silence. As dusk comes and the temperature drops, she drags two rocking chairs over to the fireplace and lights a fire. She sits down and watches the flames. I think about my mother and try to rock my anger out.

  15

  She has no toilet.

  How can anyone have no toilet? Is it legal to have no toilet?

  “I turned the pipes off,” Agatha says. “I can’t afford no plumber.”

  In the backyard, behind a chicken coop with several clucking chickens, sits an outhouse surrounded by a thicket of weedy lilacs. It has a plank door and a window that faces east. It tips to the left.

  “This is my old girl, Esther. She’s near a hundred, you know. Imagine her tippin’ over with me sittin’ inside. Now that would be a sight, wouldn’t it? So I treat her real nice, give her a name and everything, so she holds herself up proper.”

  She laughs at the way I’m looking at her. “Never used an outhouse before?”

  I shake my head.

  “The only problem is late at night when it’s real cold and you want to get out there and back in bed real quick. Other than that, it’s pretty good. Lots of fresh air, anyway.”

  I can’t imagine why anyone would want a window in an outhouse. Anyone could peek in. And worse, I see as soon as Agatha opens the door, are the two seats, side by side. Who would want company in there?

  At least she has a roll of toilet paper on the wall. It sits under a narrow strip of golden flypaper, nearly covered with a pepper shaking of dead flies.

  16

  As night falls, something cries out from under the refrigerator.

  “Don’t be worryin’ none,” she says when I jump up from my rocking chair. “That be the cricket. Keep you up at night, I ’spect, if you’re not used to hearin’ critters.”

  She walks over to the refrigerator and kneels down. “I ain’t figured how it knows when it’s dark. Crickets chirp at night. It must be dark all the time under that icebox, but he knows just when night comes because that’s when he starts singin’ for me. Quite amazin’, if you ask me.”

  She laughs and stands up and refills our tea.

  “Any c-c-coffee?” I ask.

  “Never drink the stuff,” she says, sitting back in the rocker. I bring my tea back to my chair and listen to the cricket and the sounds of our rocking.

  Mostly, I want my mother. I want to run after the boyfriend’s car and tell her I’d be no trouble in Vegas, no trouble at all. The boyfriend wouldn’t even know I was there. I picture myself running after them. I’m so close, I’m reaching out to my mother. But she is looking away.

  17

  Agatha hoists the window open in the tiny room that is to be my bedroom. A hole stretches across a quarter of the screen.

  A full moon rises and I can see a slight outline of the mountain in the distance. I wonder, how far away is it? How long will it take to climb? I’ve always wanted to climb something that high, but could I?

  A bed covered with a faded quilt straddles three wide and uneven floorboards. It tips off one leg when I drop my milk crate near the pillow. Agatha looks at the books. “You read all those?”

  When I nod, she snorts. “No time for much of that around here.” She pulls an army blanket from under the bed and throws it on top, causing the bed to rock.

  “Do you like mushrooms?”

  I shake my head no, abs
olutely not.

  “Too bad. I eat ’em for breakfast, more often than not. Right good on toast, they are.”

  We are quiet for a few minutes while she tries to get the light switch to work. “Don’t know why your mother brought you here,” she says finally. “I don’t know nothin’ about livin’ with a young girl.” She looks at me for a minute, waiting for me to answer, but I don’t, so she points to a dresser. “Put your stuff in there if you want,” she says as she leaves the room.

  I look past her to the window. My mother will be back for my birthday; she always remembers my birthday, even when I have to bake the cake myself and wake her up to celebrate. She’ll be back for my birthday; my fifteenth birthday, I tell myself. “It’s in October,” I whisper to the mountain in the distance.

  I pull the quilt back, sending dust flying about my head. I notice a cobweb fluttering at the top of the window like a curtain.

  That’s when the loneliness settles deep. I open Oliver Twist and lose myself in its pages. Oliver survived without his mother. I wonder how.

  18

  I fill an old metal pail with water and scrub my room, top to bottom. I wash the floor, paying particular attention to the space under the bed, and I wipe down the window frame, flinging the cobwebs outside. I mop out the dresser and put my books in the top drawer. Then I unpack my clothes. Two pairs of overalls from the Salvation Army tag sale, my black dress, pocket T-shirts in assorted colors, and my most prized collection other than my books: my socks. Most were purchased at thrift stores: Christmas socks, purple socks, wool socks, socks with lace. Church thrift shops were especially good for hand-knit socks, and sometimes after paying a dollar or two for a pair, I would wander upstairs and sit in a pew and wonder what all the fuss was about.

  The smell I liked a lot. Incense, heavy and thick, hung like blankets all around me. Me and the statues, surrounded by silence. I liked that the best.

  “What the hell you want with church?” my mother said once after I’d told her where I’d been. “You really are a ninny sometimes, Corns. There ain’t no one who goes to church but hypocrites and fools. Don’t you know that?”

  Well, I didn’t want to be a hypocrite or a fool, so I shut the door to that part of my life and didn’t go back.

  19

  Agatha and I climb the rise behind her house to where the fields begin. The grass under my feet grows brown and dry and uncut. I crunch through one pasture, then another, each one rising higher than the last.

  Agatha searches for mushrooms, but not me—I won’t have anything to do with them. I just want to get closer to the mountain that reaches high in the distance. I tell myself I’m getting closer to my mother with each step.

  We turn a bend and there’s a brook ahead. She takes a metal cup off a nail on a tree and climbs down a bank and scoops up some water. She takes a long, slurping gulp.

  “Come taste some of this water. It’s the best you’ll ever drink.”

  I’m not so sure. She eyes me carefully. “This is the real thing. You’ve been planted in the city too long.”

  I sip the water at first, but it fills my mouth with so much life that I gulp more.

  “Where’d you be gettin’ that stutter?” she asks as I hand the cup back to her.

  Why does everyone always ask that? I don’t know when. In first grade, I already hated talking, that’s all I know.

  I shrug, but I don’t know if she sees me, because I’m drinking more water.

  We watch two squirrels scream at each other in a pine tree and then we climb over a stone wall and down a short slope and then up another rise. I brace myself for the advice everyone gives, especially my mother: Try harder, Corns, for goodness’ sake. I know you could talk regular if you pull yourself together. Just pick easier words.

  Or the fifth-grade teacher, helpful as hail: Take a breath, Cornelia. Slow down, relax, think about what you want to say before you say it. You just need more backbone, that’s all.

  They made it sound so easy. Try harder, stutter less. But when I try harder, I stutter more. When I pick easier words, I stutter on easier words. And I can’t pick an easier word when someone asks me my name.

  So I quit talking most of the time. Always better to keep stuff inside. Squish the shame down to your toes if you have to. Keep it hidden there. No one gets it anyway.

  20

  I feel Agatha behind me as I pour suds into her kitchen sink and pile my socks beneath the running water. A rusted washing machine sits unused in the corner of the kitchen, its top spread with clay pots of apple mint and rosemary and sage.

  Agatha wears the same overalls day after day and switches from a flannel shirt to a T-shirt, depending on the weather. The only exception she makes to her laundry system is her underclothes. She wears cotton things she calls underdrawers edged in lace and she washes these by hand with soap flakes. Then she hangs them on the branches of an oak near the house, a spot anyone could see from the road.

  I fix all this, of course. I hang a clothesline out back, first of all, and get her underwear out of sight.

  There isn’t much I can do about ironing because she threw her iron away when it broke years ago. “Ironin’ makes no sense at all,” she tells me one day as I try to press a pair of my overalls with my hands. And of course she keeps no starch and no fabric softener. My clothes smell wonderful when I bring them in from the line, all warm from the sun, but soon they pick up the odor of the house, sort of the way a cupboard smells when it hasn’t been opened in a while.

  “E-e-e-everything around here s-smells old and d-d-dried out.” I am folding clothes into neat piles on the table, my nose buried in one of my shirts.

  “You want your clothes to smell good?” my aunt says, looking up from the peas she is shelling. “Then go roll around in the hay.”

  21

  “Yoo-hoo!” Agatha yells to me through my window one morning. I am reading again. There are no books in this house other than what I brought, and I’ve read everything so many times I’d read a dictionary at this point.

  “Cornelia, I need help getting to the dump.” Agatha presses her nose against the screen to see into my room. I sink further into my book. “Get out of that bed and come help me.”

  I roll over, pretending she is a puff of smoke, gone in an instant. “You read too damn much, Cornelia. You’re hiding in those books. Now get your butt out here and give me a hand.”

  When I don’t move, she pulls the screen out of the window. “If you don’t get out here, I’m coming in there and dragging you out.”

  22

  Agatha hands me a straw hat and then walks quickly to the barn. “What’s this for?”

  “You’ll see,” she yells over her shoulder.

  As soon as she pushes open the wooden doors, the dry smell of crushed hay and the sweet thickness of old manure soar up my nose. The stalls are empty; the floor lumps with wear. A big pile of trash bags heap in one corner. A broken rake, chipped canning jars, and a coil of old rope lie on top.

  When I take a couple of steps forward, I notice a thick netting of spiderwebs strung across the beams over my head. Big fawn-colored spiders crawl through the heavy maze. I stop, unable to move, and pull my hat against my head. Oh my God.

  “That’s why we wear hats,” Agatha says, chuckling. “I’ll back Bertha up, you start piling stuff on.”

  I don’t move. I want to go home.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Agatha asks. “Barns have spiders. That’s the way it is round here.”

  I am sure I feel something crawling up my leg. “Why d-don’t you vacuum or something?” I scratch the back of my knee with one hand and use the other to hold the hat on my head.

  “A barn? Are you kiddin’?” She laughs and walks off to get the truck. She’s still chuckling after she backs up the truck and comes around and grabs a garbage bag.

  “You don’t know much about barns, do you? You need the spiders to get rid of the flies. Maybe your ma made a mistake bringin’ you here.”
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  I am sure of it.

  23

  “Time you met my truck, anyway,” Agatha says as we load the first of the bags onto the back. “Bertha, this is Cornelia.” She laughs, picks up another bag, and throws it on the back.“I got her in 1975 from Eldin up the road, and she’s still the best thing I ever bought. She can haul anything: pumpkins, tires, trash. I use her to pull stumps and to haul manure for the garden. Once I used her to help me hoist Esther up a bit, she was slumping so.”

  I keep one eye on the spiders and think that Esther could use some more hoisting. “Do you n-n-n-name everything around here?”

  “When you live alone, you learn who your friends are. And you treat them fine if you want them to stick around.”

  Bertha is the same faded green as the unripe tomatoes in the garden. The passenger door is tied shut with clothesline. The tailgate has been repaired with wooden rails. Everything on the inside, I see as soon as I open the door, is patched with duct tape.

  “No g-g-garbage trucks?” I ask as we roar out of her driveway and onto Route 1.

  She laughs. “You don’t think anyone would want to pay for something like that around here, do you?”

  It isn’t really a question, because Agatha snorts after she says it. I turn and look out the window. We pass a dozen fields, empty, bordered by stone walls. The road turns to gravel as we head south; a deer jumps out in front of us. “Whoa, Bertha, don’t you hit that doe,” Agatha yells as we bounce over deep ruts in the road. I hold on to the seat.

  Agatha pulls onto a dirt road with a sign that says TOWN DUMP. HARRISVILLE RESIDENTS ONLY. The road is littered with old washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, and dishwashers. Agatha stops in front of a pile of garbage the size of a small mountain.