This Earth You'll Come Back To Read online

  Table of Contents

  I : Arrival

  II : Departures

  III : Origins

  IV : Marriage

  V : Visitations

  VI : Maladies

  VII : Farewells

  This Earth

  You’ll Come

  Back To

  ,

  a novel by

  Barbara

  Roether

  McPherson & Company

  Kingston, New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Roether

  All rights in all media reserved.

  This ebook may not be reproduced without expressed permission.

  First eBook edition 2022

  eBook ISBN 978-1-62054-056-5

  Published by McPherson & Company,

  Post Office Box 1126, Kingston, New York 12402

  www.mcphersonco.com

  in memoriam

  Edna Rose Haley Roether

  1920-2007

  This Earth

  You’ll Come

  Back To

  I : Arrival

  2008

  Blanchardville, Ohio

  Course you couldn’t find it right away. It’s not so easy, what with all the names and pathways, if you’re not familiar with the layout to begin with. Not in the heat of July. Still, there was no need for you to carry on like that, walking around half crying and stumbling sorry for yourself ’cause you couldn’t see it right away. You should have used the sense God gave you and asked your brother, could have drove you right in to the place. I don’t know why you had him drop you off downtown, walking all the way out here by yourself in the blazing crown of the day. You must have come out by West Main Cross and there’s not a bit of shade there now they took the maple trees out to build the parking lot for the church, took down Grandma’s old house too. That about broke my heart. Must be more than two miles. Don’t you have a hat? Why you always insist on making things hard for yourself I’ll never know; but it’s just like you to take a simple errand and turn it into a full-blown crusader pilgrimage.

  Well there’s not another soul around today just the old maples with their green overall, the grass and the flowerpots, next to the American flags. And you my daughter walking in a circle trying to find a landmark you recognize. Reading all the names; names of the people you went to school with, their grandparents, parents, uncles. Names you haven’t thought of for thirty-odd years since you left here. All those names you used to hear in the daylight of desk rows deep in the rapture of childhood; Weisling, Frankhauser, Riley, Lynch, Slawinski. Each name ringing out with a voice around it, ringing up days in which the names were spoken, and all those days stretching back until you feel the beginning of your life and the end too. It comes over you all the sudden. That your leaving here and living in California all these years, the stories you wrote or didn’t write will never matter at all, because you know you can’t get away from this, this earth you’ll come back to right here. You feel its pull. It’s not a bad feeling. Oh the earth is the same earth anywhere it lies, and that is a comfort to you I know. Everything we ever tried or said or dreamed, every finger, backbone, jaw, falling down here like leaves. As if the ground itself were made of our passing lives, compacting into the dark soil of time.

  I know you feel the earth, child. You feel its spreading kindness. I remember you wanted me to buy you a copy of Leaves of Grass, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I liked Walt Whitman too, except my favorites were his poems about Lincoln, “Oh Captain my Captain our fearful trip is done.” I never did buy it for you on account of he was homosexual. But that’s way off our subject. Where were we?

  Well at least by now you know you’re in with the Catholics, you know you’re close. You found the big old Healy stone that’s Aunt Marybell’s, you know my grandmother’s sister. She was so vain she wanted to have a bigger stone than her own sister if you can imagine.

  Now there’s no need for you to carry on like that. Bleating around like a little lost lamb, making a fool of yourself, hiding behind the oak tree when old Mr. Heinke’s wife pulls up the gravel drive in her red Buick. She’s out of the car with the pot of petunias, those tacky purple petunias, leaves them and back in the air conditioning in three minutes, and has done with it, like you could have; instead of acting like a child and mooning around with some fool notion. Feeling sorry for yourself, and getting all upset because you can’t find your own mother’s grave. Well, you can’t find anything with your eyes blurred by tears. I’m right behind you but you keep going the wrong way round.

  Oh I know when you came today you’d been thinking how you missed being with your mother your whole life and now it’s too late. Seems like you’ve already decided that’s the tragedy you’re working up to tell. How we lived and died so far from each other. But I was there all along.

  What are you around forty-seven now? All swept up in grief and regret about what you haven’t managed to write or do. And now you’ve decided our distance was the reason. Maybe you could explain why you weren’t here until the end of the funeral, not to keep harping on that. There’s two sides to every story. Now I hear even your own son calls you Miss. I. Regret. Speaking of your son why didn’t you bring him along last time you came to see me when I was alive? I asked you to bring him, but you acted like it didn’t matter. Deaf ears. I wanted to see him. Every child begins the world all over again. That’s why we have them you know.

  ·

  Well what’s any mother to any child? Sounds abstract but you have to shake it out to the doing and dealing with every day. Life is what you do every day, what your hands touch and feel. Remember in The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes into the underworld, meets up with poor Achilles, and Achilles tells him that any paltry shred of human living is more precious than eternal glory. I didn’t even like that story when Sister made me read it in eighth grade, but now a’ course I see his point.

  ·

  So, how do you measure love? What evidence can be offered of its existence? Is it what is remembered or what is forgotten between those who love each other? Is its measure what is swallowed back, or what is spoken?

  ·

  Now that you’ve found my marker you can’t see how you’d missed it in the first place. It isn’t even a shock, just like death really isn’t such a shock. Gave you a moment of comfort, finding my name carved out clear in the standing stone of daylight. There is proof of her being, you thought, for all the world to see. You let your breath out relieved but no more than one breath when oh, so crestfallen an expression I never did see as you looked down. I guess it took you by surprise there not being any grass grown over the plot yet. The earth here brown and bare; green to each side but the square right over me just brown and plain.

  But how could that be you’re thinking, after six months, after the snow of that frigid day in January, by now by July there should be some grass.

  Oh at first you’re angry enough to raise the dead or those of them that haven’t yet been raised. Why can’t your mother have some grass, some deep rich green grass to cover the place like everyone else, why should her place lie brown and uncovered? Scarred with the brown of poverty. Can this woman never have anything abundant? Is grass extra in the price of dying? Why did she have to live and die now too in the ever glowing glare of not enough. Even that isn’t the whole story is it? You see your own shame in that brown square, see what you were too careless to attend to. You wonder how the earth could know of your omission. Withholding its blessing because you had been so late for your o
wn mother’s funeral? Too far away to make it back until the last minute.

  Course in the larger scheme of things a lack of grass here isn’t much to speak of. The plot just hasn’t fully settled in yet. And oh they’re cheap out here. You have to ask them special to put new sod on and it costs. George came by once on the tractor with grass seed but then the floods came right after him, washed it away. On the other hand now, notice your father’s place next to mine, all nice green and perfectly mowed. Some things never change.

  ·

  I can tell this story if you want me to, dear daughter, but maybe not all in a row. That never was how my mind worked, but inasmuch as one thing leads to another, well, it should suffice. You’ll have to listen and let me tell it in my own way, which means not just after you were born or not just about you, though you have been the easiest to love, most of the time. I think we had similar temperaments, so we understood each other, though not all mothers and children do. It’s not a given, though you’d think so wouldn’t you? Some children take after their fathers, as several of mine certainly did and I don’t have to belabor that point.

  People always asked me why did you have ten children, and did your husband drink because of that, or did I have them in spite of that, well who’s to say? Their number and his drinking relate as much as one thing to anything else if you want it to.

  ·

  This is the first chance I’ve had to even think about it so much. Someone was always getting born or getting sick, I don’t mean just my own children and my grandchildren, but theirs too and uncles, aunts, my brother with that brain tumor. Of course those fools out at Valley Hospital, I call it Death Valley, couldn’t diagnose it for two years, you’d think they would know more than they do, well he suffered so, and for what?

  But now we’re free to talk. Are you still nursing the notion that a lot of what goes wrong for you comes down to the fact of you growing up so poor? Those are your words now, I never thought like that, poor or not poor. Call it what you like, I did the best I could. That wasn’t enough for some of my children and it’s awful when your own turn on you. Grow up to be whoever they are and then get mad because you didn’t do things the way they would have. I don’t mean you, you’re not so spiteful by nature. But I know your sister Kate is out there bad-mouthing me from her spotless house that I wasn’t organized enough. I should have done more. It’s not logical. Course logic never stopped anybody in this family. Sometimes I want to say to hell with the lot of ’em. We can always think of a reason this or that happened but just because we think it don’t make it so.

  You want me to tell you how I raised ten children without any money, but didn’t give in to despair. Why I didn’t give in? Well, what’s there to give in to when you think about it, where you gonna go on God’s earth? I guess you can tell me that, since going seemed to be your approach. You want me to tell how my husband never did drink himself to death but not for lack of trying? He died in the middle of the living room sure, but that’s no great accomplishment, everybody dies.

  Then of course if ten children is too many which one wouldn’t I have had? As you’re the ninth I’d watch yourself there. I know you’ve had abortions; don’t think that never occurred to me. I asked you several times why you only had one child, and you didn’t answer. You don’t want me to talk about that but I certainly will. The church tells us it’s a sin, but now you see it’s a sin against the body, you felt the pain of that sin. And you grieved for those who never came, those you talked yourself out of saying you didn’t have enough of something, didn’t have enough time or space or help. Took the idea of there not being enough into your own body, didn’t you. Still, you ought to forgive yourself. Life does come and go, women know that.

  ·

  Look at the starlings today how they flock and turn, fold together, shake out. European starlings they are, not native either you know, some fool man interested in Shakespeare thought they ought to bring over all the birds he mentioned in his plays, took a terrible toll on the farms around here, I don’t know why people can’t leave well enough alone. Still they’re pretty to watch.

  Well I have no problem now finding the hours that have gone some time ago, but knowing about more recent events is harder to sort out. Like trying to find your place in a book when you’ve lost your page, you flip through but it seems the whole order of events has shifted, and maybe you’ve never read any of it after all. Course I can see fine what’s right around here.

  ·

  This is a pretty place, as places go. You can hear the boys playing softball in the field over at Lawson Park there in summer the crack of the bat and a rise of cheers through the locust chorus. In winter the kids come and sled there on the hill. It’s not much of a hill, but for this part of Ohio it’s noteworthy, plenty big for the little ones. Snow muffles the voices though. I miss the sound of the little children.

  That hill used to be the bank of a horseshoe bend in the river, which is why they made it a park, since it’s prone to flooding and shifting. Wasn’t good for anything else. Flooding continues to be an issue here, as I’ll explain later. Well what would you expect of a place that used to be the Great Black Swamp? You always laughed when I mentioned it but it’s true, look at any old map of northwest Ohio. This was the edge of the glacier that created Lake Erie. Course plants grow where there’s water, fall and decay you get a good number of layers like that creates deposits of natural gas. This was a gas boom town in 1886 is why my Grandpa Tindal, my Mother’s father, came over from Belgium as a glass blower. I know I’ve told you all this before but maybe you’ll listen now. See how it’s all related, now that I’m here in the ground along with the rest of it. As a matter of fact one of the major gas wells was just nearby the cemetery here, out where I-75 goes north to Toledo.

  They came like moths to the light all those workmen; so many new factories opened all at once. Well the town supplied gas free to any industry that would move here ,so the glass works came, brick yards, rolling mills. They thought the gas would never run out, and workingmen came from all over. So the Healys came to serve those men, thirsty with tending furnaces all day, and thirsty in other ways too. Everyone was coming here, no one was leaving. Like you always were.

  ·

  I’m not sure when was the first time you left, though the second or third are still vivid. I don’t count your being born though that’s one kind of leaving. Leaving the inside of the body for the outside, it’s not so far. When children are born we say they have arrived, and that’s true to a degree, but arriving isn’t the same as getting born which takes a little longer. Children come to life by days, they have to learn to live inside of time. And here I am now learning to live outside of it.

  Today you’re wandering around here crying and lost same as the day you were born. Truth is every single baby born comes to this world on the verge of hopelessness. Comes out of warm comfort to this world, heartbroken and lost, desperate to find someone, just like you are now. I’ve seen it with each of my ten children, always the same look in the eyes, a look asking one question. Can you help me? And each time I said I’ll try.

  Oh Lord, a baby’s first look is full of a tender pleading. It’s a question from a far place in the face of a tired traveler. Will you help me? it says, but more fierce than that, you better help me. Help me! That’s what every baby mouth asks, when they get here. They come asking, like hobos off the train used to come begging at Grandma’s back door when she lived near the tracks on Griffin Avenue. Grubby and hungry they come, just showing up and knocking. They don’t have to say anything and she doesn’t have to ask, need in a person is obvious.

  I remember the day you were born. It was a bitter cold morning when I went in. Ice on the streets. Dr. Best was the attending physician, but I certainly didn’t think he was the best at the time, because right after the delivery room, when they wheeled me back into my room, I couldn’t feel a
thing in my legs, they were totally numb.

  I lay there trying but I couldn’t move them, had no sensation whatsoever. Well, I thought, Rose, you have really done it now, this ninth child was just one too many and now your legs are paralyzed. Said you would help that baby but you won’t be able to now, not her or any of the others, who’s gonna chase after them? I about lost my nerve for the whole shebang right then. Started to shake with the fear of it, or with the blood I’d lost, either way exhaustion took over.

  I slept, and when I woke up I felt something in my toes. I kicked off the blankets just to see if my legs worked and they were fine. I was laughing with relief really when the nurse came by and scolded me but I didn’t care. Course it seems funny now. It was just the stirrups or something had given me a pinched nerve. I was fine by the afternoon.

  ·

  They brought you in. I recall each child clearly, it’s not a memory that dims.

  Even from here, I can remember looking into your milky blue eyes for the first time. The hospital walls fade away and there’s just a clearing. Pang of shyness I felt (came with each child) noticing you were a stranger I had never met before. At the same instant some voice in the distance that’s familiar, a conversation we’ve had before, like you knew me somehow, some previous agreement you’ve come to collect on. Your look is troubled, because you know getting born is a bad gamble, it might not work at all, but you have no recourse now, no way to return to where you came from. You’re caught in a tiny net of bones all smeared with oil and blood, a body that is of no use to you, there’s no strength in it. You have no resources whatsoever. I see the humiliation you feel, can feel you saying “Look at me, look at what has happened to me, I who am a human being, to be reduced to this, alone here, a stranger, helpless, exhausted.” There’s a sidelong glancing question in your look, you’re not sure I’ll keep my part of it but I feel a power I don’t want to offend, so I say yes.