Tending to Grace Read online

  “Now comes the fun part.” She climbs out of the truck and begins heaving the bags out into the sea of trash. “See who can throw the farthest.”

  All I can think about is how much everything stinks. Seagulls soar over us, squawking and fighting over our bags as they land. I wonder what’s in them.

  “Well, look at that,” she says, pointing out beyond the gulls.

  “L-look at what?”

  “That pot! I been needin’ one that size for a good while now. It’s perfect!”

  I try and figure out where her finger is pointing. In front of me, alongside hundreds of bags of garbage, sit a cracked plastic lawn table, a blue croquet ball, a baby’s high chair, a rug, rolled and tied, and, just a bit to the back, a pot rusted to the color of an orange marigold.

  “Cornelia, go get that pot for me.”

  I look at the pot, then at Agatha. I’d have to walk up and over several dozen garbage bags to get it. “I’m not p-p-p-picking up trash.”

  “It’s a perfectly fine pot. Just walk right over.”

  “Why don’t you just b-b-buy one at the store?”

  “And waste this perfectly good one?”

  “It’s not perfectly good. It’s r-r-r-rusted.”

  “A little cleanin’ and it will shine up good as new.”

  “Well, I’m n-not picking up a dirty old pot that somebody else used. Plus I’m not walking way out there.”

  Agatha pulls a sugar cube from her pocket and pops it into her mouth. “You don’t want anyone to see you picking up trash, is that it?”

  “It’s st-st-stupid.” I feel something crawling on my arm—an ant. I brush it off and swear under my breath.

  Agatha stomps over and pulls a ski hat from under the seat. “Here, pull it down low and pretend you’re someone you’re not.”

  I look at her, not quite believing. “Oh, shit.” I storm out to the trash and begin walking up and over the bags. My foot sinks into one bag and I smell coffee grounds. I reach for the pot, grab it, and sink farther into the garbage. The pot must weigh ten pounds.

  “Good,” she says, laughing, as I heave it onto the back of the truck. I kick the coffee grounds off my foot and climb inside and wipe my hands on the duct tape. She pulls the shift into gear and we roar off. “Now I have a pot big enough for my mushrooms.”

  24

  Agatha’s house sits on a hill, surrounded by pines, and a wind blows constant. As the weeks pass and the summer nights heat up, I learn that all that wind means few bugs fly here; mosquitoes haunt more restful spaces.

  But then comes the week of no wind, and the heat grows steadily and the humidity spreads out so thick the wet hangs all around me like a morning fog. That’s when the mosquitoes fly in the cracks between the stones in the basement and up between the cracks in the floor and down the chimney and through the beetle-sized spaces surrounding the windows. I toss in bed and dream about mosquitoes and hear their shrill hum and I wake in the morning with red welts that make me look like a plucked chicken.

  “Why d-d-don’t you f-f-f-fix this house?” I scratch at the bites that cross my arms. Agatha fries a batch of mushrooms in her new pot.

  “What’s the matter with it?” She opens a canning jar of some sort of green goo and dumps it into another pan on the stove. Three flies buzz around her hand as she stirs.

  “H-h-haven’t you noticed? The s-s-s-screens have holes. Look at all these bugs.”

  “Then fix them.” She ladles mushrooms onto her plate and spoons some of the green mixture beside them. “Fishin’ line in the barn. Rug needles in the sewin’ box back of that cupboard there. Make a spiderweb kind of thing. The time you spend readin’, you could be fixin’ those screens.” She puts her plate on the table and sits down.

  I look at her plate more closely. I live with a woman who eats little green snails.

  “They’re fiddleheads,” she says after a few bites. “Ferns. Want some?”

  I shake my head and walk out to the front step to wait for my mother.

  25

  The boyfriend doesn’t know about frozen waffles. He doesn’t know that when you stack them five high and dust them with cinnamon and powdered sugar, they will get my mother out of bed on a cold afternoon. The boyfriend doesn’t know that a cigarette and a cup of coffee calm her when she starts to shake, and he doesn’t know that watching I Love Lucy reruns gets her to laugh and improves the day immensely.

  My mother is my fix-up project, not his. My life is predictable, constant, when it is bookended by one fix-up and then another. I buy carrots and cabbage and peas and puree them into soup so she’ll eat something other than Ring Dings. I turn off the gas on the stove after she has fallen asleep with the teapot boiling itself empty. And I feel strong in the fixing. That’s the thing. I feel strong in the fixing.

  26

  “Carrots got to be thinned to three inches apart,” Agatha tells me one morning. “You got to pull the ones that are too close. Like this.” She kneels in the middle of the garden, picking tiny seedlings out of the dirt and tossing them into a ragged pile on the side.

  I look doubtful. “Why d-d-d-don’t we leave them where they are? They l-l-look like babies.”

  “If we don’t thin them out, they won’t grow any bigger around than my little finger.” Each wispy plant she pulls has a thin thread of orange at the bottom. I look at her throwaways and see myself.

  I flop onto the ground. Of all the chores I can think of, gardening is worst. I hate the dirt; I hate the smell of the dirt. I want to go inside and read. I want to read something where the mother gets the love part right.

  “What’s takin’ you so long?” Agatha looks up at me. She’s got a smudge of dirt across her forehead and another along the length of her nose. Her braid hangs loose.

  I turn my back to her and pull a seedling, then another. I put them into my pocket. When I fill my pocket, I dig a tiny new garden between the rows and replant all the seedlings she’s made me pull.

  The sun scorches my shoulders red and as the humidity hurries in, the horseflies follow. Relentless bits of wing and sting, three of them circle my head without stopping. Over and over, they dive at my neck, my back, my face.

  “This is n-n-n-nuts,” I say, standing and shielding my face from the flies. “I quit.”

  “You can’t quit, not if you want to eat.”

  “I don’t w-w-want to eat carrots. I hate carrots. I hate this. All of it.”

  I stand there glaring at her while a horsefly lands on my shoulder. She gets up off her knees.

  “You’re just like your mother,” she says. “Temper like a tornado. I didn’t ask you to come here, you know.” An inch of dirt cakes the knees of her overalls. She doesn’t bother to brush it off.

  “I didn’t ask to c-c-c-come here either,” I scream.

  “Well, we see eye to eye on one thing, anyway. Now pull those carrots.”

  “I’m d-done.” I stand up and wipe my hands on my pants.

  “No, you got to finish this row. I’m goin’ to clean the henhouse. If you want to eat, you damn well better work.”

  “H-h-h-horseshit!”

  She laughs at me low and hard. “You goin’ to cuss, you got to make your voice like you mean it. And it’s hen shit I’m cleanin’, not horseshit.”

  Is this the reason I was born? I wonder as Agatha walks off across the yard. To be dumped off and brought here to this old woman who drinks tea made of tree roots? Let her just think I’m staying here one second past the moment my mother arrives.

  “I’m leaving soon as my m-m-m-mother gets here,” I yell at her back.

  She turns. “I don’t see her comin’, do you?”

  27

  The next day Agatha slaps a postcard on the table with a picture of a seagull in flight.

  I flip it over, afraid to breathe.

  I notice right off there’s no Dear Cornelia, no Love, Mother, and no return address. I wonder if my mother saw her reflection in the glossy front of the card. I throw it in
the trash. Then I pull it out and put it in my pocket and walk out to the garden. My carrot seedlings that I replanted lie withered on the ground. I try to stand them up again by mounding their feet in little hills of dirt.

  “Don’t you know you can’t be replantin’ carrots?” Agatha says as she walks up from behind. “Their roots ain’t strong enough to go down deep.”

  28

  My fingers scratch themselves raw on a Brillo pad as I bear down harder on the kitchen table. Agatha forgot to wash her molasses spoon, to the delight of the flies. She is so irritating I could spit on her. I push harder and turn the table into a field of steel-blue suds.

  Bertha chugs up the driveway and as Agatha slams the door of the truck, she screeches, “Cornelia! Look!”

  She rushes into the kitchen and grabs my wet arm, pulling me out the door and into the yard. White fluff swirls all around me.

  “I bet you never saw anything like this!” she says. “I’ll give you three guesses what it is, and it’s not snow!” She holds up her fingers and catches the cotton wisps that drift past. I walk out into the middle of the lawn and look straight into the white softness. The fluff looks like large airy snowflakes. I reach for one and hold it in the palm of my hand. “M-m-milkweed?” We raised monarch butterflies in science once.

  “No,” she says, laughing and spinning around and around. Her braid unropes itself from its pins and flies behind her. “They’re dandelions. They’re sending off their seed, becomin’ something new. This is a lucky day, Cornelia.”

  She leaps into the air, reaching high for the fluff sailing past, catches some, and tosses it out again. The flour white softens everything and begins to smudge the wrinkles on her face. She springs higher and higher as the wind picks up and sends the wisps heavenward. Even I can’t help but smile.

  I walk deeper into the gentle flurry. Very slowly, I begin to twirl around, first one way and then the other. I raise my arms, reaching up and pulling pieces of fluff into my hands. I breathe deeply and twirl faster, faster, and as I’m twirling, I’m laughing.

  For just a moment, I want to rush into the house and fling on my black Salvation Army dress and dance back through the white softness. And I wouldn’t give a hoot about the meanness of anything.

  29

  “You can eat them, you know,” my aunt says that night as she peels a potato at the kitchen table. “Dandelions, I mean.”

  “The fluff?”

  “No,” she says, laughing so hard she has to put the potato down. “You really aren’t from around here, are you? You eat the leaves. Sauté them up with garlic, toss them in a salad. Either way, they’re out of this world.”

  “Y-y-you’d eat anything, wouldn’t you?”

  She picks up her potato again and starts peeling.

  “You get hungry enough, you eat just about anything. Except for coffee. Rot your stomach out, that will.”

  30

  The temperature soars and my aunt and I begin fighting over the chores, the food, the mess, my reading, the lack of coffee in the house. We slam doors and storm outside. She snaps at my cleaning; I yell at her mess. We fume at each other like two chickens in the same sweltering roost.

  I wipe the sweat off my forehead and sweep the cobwebs off the beams overhead. I wash down the walls, and while I’m at it, I try to make sense of my life. There is no music in this house, other than the birds outside; no radio, no television. I have nothing to distract me. What now, what now, what now? I ask over and over as I wash the refrigerator, sweep the floor, scrub the stairs, wash the windows.

  I slam the cupboard door and run outside when I find little brown pellets at the back of the cupboard.

  Agatha kneels beside her squash plants, checking for bugs.

  “There’s m-m-m-mouse poop in there,” I say when I reach her.

  She looks up at me. “Set some traps.”

  “I c-c-can’t believe you live in such a m-m-m-mess,” I yell, kicking the pumpkin plant in the row next to her, tearing half of it out of the ground. I run up to the fields above the house, sinking into the grass that now reaches to my thighs, screaming until my head aches. All I want is a life that is tidy, where the edges are hemmed and straight and the corners are tucked and tight as new cotton sheets.

  31

  Agatha whacks her moccasins against the side of the fireplace when I walk back into the house. Caked mud flies off the old leather and onto the floor. She ignores the dirt and walks into her room and tosses the moccasins on her bed.

  She hasn’t touched the mouse droppings, so I take everything out of the cupboards, including old tins of spices with chipped paint hanging off their faces. I sweep out the cupboards, and then I sprinkle an entire can of tub cleaner inside and scrub the wood until it bleaches to a soft buff.

  I find mousetraps in the only closet in the house—a little sliver of a thing beside the back door—and I load them with peanut butter and set them behind the plates.

  “What you doin’ with that there rat trap?” Agatha asks, walking out of her room. “You’ll have guts all over the place if you use that. It’ll take a mouse head off faster than an ax whacks a chicken. That’s for the rats that get into the grain in the barn. What you doin’ in that closet, anyway?”

  “I was cleaning it s-s-s-so I could p-p-p-put the big soup pot in there. I f-found these.”

  “Well, top of the stove works just as well for the soup pot. I don’t put nothing in that closet ’cept for traps and tools. That crack that’s in the back of it goes clear to the outdoors. You can see the stars at night from in there if you look up. It’s kind of fun. You should try it sometime.”

  She pulls a sugar cube from her pocket and munches it slowly. She no longer offers them to me.

  “You gotta get used to livin’ in a house like this, Cornelia. Why don’t you stop wastin’ your time and come help me in the garden?”

  “If I’m going to l-l-l-live here, I’ve got to clean it up. How can you live like this?”

  She chuckles.“Don’t look at it. That works pretty good,” she says, walking back outside.

  I kick a chair when she leaves. Then I make my way down to the basement. Dozens of jars of home-canned food cover one sloping shelf, but I can’t tell what’s inside until I wipe the dust with my shirt. Old stringy pickles float in some of the jars, carrots or something orange fills others, and some are stuffed with something that could be beets. Green goo fills a couple dozen jars on the shelf above. I toss them all into old bushel baskets and carry them out to the barn.

  32

  Bertha is loaded with a fifty-pound bag of oatmeal, a twenty-five-pound bag of whole wheat flour, and another of brown rice. We tuck tofu between us on the front seat, lentils on the floor, and dry milk powder in the crawl space behind our seats. Agatha fit right in at the health-food store; I was the only one not wearing moccasins.

  “Don’t you eat any meat at all?”

  “Not for a long while,” she says, loading a bag of carob chips. “Doesn’t make much sense to me, stuffing myself with dead animals.”

  The store is in Dover, two towns away, and as we drive back to Agatha’s, we pass a bank, a bookstore, a whole string of little shops selling ice cream and antiques and doughnuts.

  “C-c-c-can you get me a c-c-coffee?”

  “Nah,” Agatha says, pulling a thermos from under the seat. “I brought the sassafras.”

  33

  We drive in the slow lane, like we do everything else. As we head off the highway and into Harrisville, Agatha pulls Bertha over to the side of the road. Two wicker chairs sit near a mailbox with a FREE sign hooked to their backs.

  “Well, I can see those out by the barn, can’t you?”

  No, I can’t, I think as she stops. They are the same tomato green as the truck and are covered with mud. “They don’t even stand up right.”

  Agatha doesn’t listen. She climbs onto the back of the truck and pushes the oatmeal out of the way. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  As we
get the second chair onto the truck, a pickup rumbles to a stop. “Agatha!” A man jumps out and hurries toward us. My aunt plants her feet into the gravel.

  “You ladies need a hand?”

  “You stop just to give me help, Moss?” Agatha says.

  The man laughs. “Sure.”

  “Well, the job’s already done. Two chairs for my garden.”

  “I did want to talk to you about that woodlot, Agatha. You gonna sell it to me this year?”

  She snorts. “I knew there was more. I got the same answer I gave you last year, Moss. No.”

  “You can make a good pocket of cash off it—I keep telling you that, Agatha.”

  “And I keep telling you, I’m not lettin’ no one buy my land.”

  He takes off his cap and wipes his forehead with his arm. “Your house, Agatha, it could surely use a little money put into it. Be a shame to let an old place like that go.”

  “My business, not yours,” she says.

  He winks at me. “I’m Moss, Moss Jackson.” He reaches his hand out to shake mine. “I own the land right up to Agatha’s. Isn’t that right, Agatha?” He looks back at me. “And you’re?”

  Think about anything else, I tell myself as I reach out my hand. I turn to Agatha, hoping she’ll tell him who I am. Instead, she looks back at me. I begin turning myself to stone.

  Think about all the fish heads and old bologna sandwiches and half-eaten Pop-Tarts that rot inside all the garbage bags at the dump, I tell myself. Think about tuna in a lunch box, six days old.

  “Ummm,” I say finally. I breathe deeply through my nose. I loop my thumbs in my belt loops and pull until they are as red as cherries. “C-c-c-c ...”

  A grin moves across his face. He chuckles. “Cat got your tongue?” I turn miserably to Agatha. She is not chuckling. She is looking straight at me.

  Why doesn’t she do anything? She could just say my name, make this all go away, but she stands there, still as pond water.