This Earth You'll Come Back To Read online

  January 1972

  Blanchardville

  What time is it anyway? Better get up. Where did I put those slippers, damn, I wish I could find them. This linoleum floor is cold, how cold is it out there I wonder. I’ll turn the TV on. get the weather report while the water boils. Oh doesn’t look like it snowed more, some sun coming out now. 30° not so bad. Stephanie’s birthday. Oh it was bitter cold the morning I had her. Wasn’t such a good year, but things got a little better after she came. Rusty started working again. Count your blessings. Oh hell I’m almost out of instant coffee. Guess I better try to get over to Food Town. Can’t remember what Stephanie did say, had Girl Scouts or Campfire, whatever it is she’s in. I think she’s coming home late after some thing at school. Well I’ll make supper early, so we can eat before I have to go to work. Noodles sound good, she likes those. I’ll see what meat is on sale. Oh there’s the 12 o’clock news. So Tricky Dick is going to China. That’ll do us all a lot of good. Damn heathens all of ’em. Poor Oolan, Mother said. I heard Pearl Buck once at a Chautauqua up on the lake there near Erie. Oh that was a sad story poor Oolan, her husband stealing the pearls from off her neck. Terrible. Dear Sister Ursula. Always had us sending pennies to China. Better carry that laundry to the basement. Then I’ll clean up, take a mop to that dining room floor like I’ve been saying I would, not that any of ’em would ever turn a hand to help. I bet I can find an angel food cake over there. Stephanie likes that. I better get a move on.

  You were walking along thinking.

  No one’s going to remember my birthday, not that it matters now it’s already 4:30 they didn’t even know it was my birthday in the Girl Scout meeting, the center is just behind downtown at least it’s a little closer to home, I can go straight down West Cory, I want to get a camping badge it will be getting dark soon have to walk fast to get home before dark. It’s hard to walk over the black patches of ice on the sidewalk, can’t go around it cause the snow is piled up so high on the sides, but not here on the green arching metal bridge the frozen river below looks solid but you can’t walk on it or you might fall through like the relative in Michigan did in a lake behind his house he was only seven, only a little boy that never even got to be twelve. On the other side of the bridge solid land, the machine shop door is open the men still welding how the sparks run out in front of them like a fountain of fire what do they make in there. Don’t even think about your birthday, there won’t be anything at home so just get used to that. Even if anybody remembers, they don’t have any money to buy presents or cake or anything, you’re not a baby, you’ve had a lot of birthdays it’s not like you’re a little kid. Earlier just after school, the sun was out, the icicles hanging over the front porches were dripping and water ran across the street, but now the melting has stopped it’s getting colder. So quiet now except when a car comes by a peeling sound, no one else is out all the other kids walked home an hour ago, only these same old everyday houses on both sides of the street with their rectangle window eyes shut and dark their pointed heads settling into stillness, snow shovels leaning next to the door and the frozen tricycles on the grey porches.

  What story is this like maybe the Dickens story Little Dorit. I’m very tragic, a poor little waif, threadbare like my coat; or I could be in a Fitzgerald story a careless adventurer, a very sophisticated traveling woman, a woman who is walking to a hotel in Moscow. Dickens seems more realistic. Still hurry up home because maybe someone remembered. Make your feet go slower because they haven’t. The sky is pink and purple in the west you can feel darkness coming. It doesn’t matter whether there is anything or not. Why do tears keep getting in your eyes then? If anyone sees me I’ll say it was the cold. Maybe if I were a better person. This morning mother wasn’t awake when I left for school, since she works at the newspaper she gets off at two in the morning so she tries to sleep. The oven in the stove doesn’t even work so even if she had remembered she couldn’t bake a cake. Sister Linda or Annie might remember and bake a chocolate cake and come over. Maybe they would try to surprise me. I can picture them. But probably not. Besides it doesn’t matter. It’s just sinful and selfish to just think about your own birthday. Why did you have to have a birthday and get your hopes all up anyway, that’s the worst part. It’s stupid that there are tears in your eyes again if they came all the way down would they freeze.

  A lot of people are in Vietnam dying and you’re just worried about your stupid little birthday. Of course it’s irrelevant, birthdays are stupid anyway you’ve had already twelve of them; you’re not a baby. Would it be chocolate? If there were a present what would it be? Mother has enough to do just to get dinner cooked before she leaves for work at six anyway, sometimes she can’t even finish it, so how could she do more. Here’s the corner of Defiance already and the stop light at Main Street. It’s only two more blocks, one down one over to Pine then you’ll know. Legs are frozen cold on the thigh where my coat doesn’t cover, these books are heavy. I don’t really want to get home, it doesn’t matter what happens, my birthday is almost over anyway.

  You opened the door and the warmth took you in, the living room had been cleaned and vacuumed. You could smell chicken cooking and hear me singing in the kitchen.

  I heard you come in, “Hi, Honey, I’m in the kitchen”

  I was just finishing up the dishes. You didn’t answer, so I came down the hallway my hands still wet with dishwater, I wiped them on my apron, before I reached out for you.

  “Hi Sweetheart, Happy Birthday, baby girl” and I wrapped you in my arms and, kissed your cold stiff cheek, but noticed a salty trace there. Your face turned slightly away.

  “Now what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  But I heard the lump in your throat. Girls at that age are emotional I thought. Nothing wrong with that. Let ’em be.

  Well you saw the cake on the table; an angel food cake from the store, whipped cream and pineapple to go along with it. There was a card, candy. You didn’t say anything. Maybe couldn’t I see now.

  “Well sweetheart I didn’t have a chance to get a present, maybe later this week. I’m making chicken and noodles; I know that’s your favorite.”

  ·

  That was a day you have always remembered, when you dared to be tender which is not often; that day you realized that what you or anybody wanted when they were out walking in the cold alone was just for someone to be waiting.

  Someone holding you in mind, though you couldn’t see them; holding you in the net of their mind and pulling you nearer. Wasn’t gifts or cake or any of that mattered, except your mother’s arms coming out of the steamy kitchen and wrapping around you where you wouldn’t have to be single or apart or anyone else.

  All along I’ve been waiting for you to come home.

  II : Departures

  I want to talk about my own mother now as talking brings her close to me. Edna Catherine Tindal Healy, born in 1897, died in 1976. She was born on Center Street here in town. Did you know that wasn’t her given name. She had been named Adrianna originally, for her paternal Grandfather Adrienne Tindal but when she was young no one wanted to be a foreigner and she called her self Edna. No one knows why she picked Edna but she did. Oh Steph, you never saw her when she was young but she had the most beautiful fine brown hair, that had a light blond streak in back; one eyebrow and eyelash was blond, while the other was dark brown.

  When my mother and father were first married they lived over on Washington Street, and after some time then his family thought that he should try his hand at the farm. My dad’s mother had bought it at a sheriff’s sale along with several other properties and businesses. No one ever could figure out where she got her money, they say Grandpa made it running his card games on the Interurban, but he died just before this time.

  Well this farm had absolutely no modern facilities. There was a privy, a well, no tractors, team of horses called Captain and Chester, big custard-colored Belgians. This farm was five miles out on Dixie Highway. My sister Jeanne and I were both born at Grandma Tindal’s in Blanchardville at 403 Griffin Avenue. Mother came into town to have us, but Bess was born at the farm.

  So, no amenities whatsoever there, a pump, a woodstove. Neither Mom nor Dad had any experience with farming but they liked the idea of having the farmhouse, all the space; there were lovely old black walnut trees in the yard. When you went off to Oregon and you wanted to live like that with your woodstove and lanterns, I thought now haven’t we all been through this before? What’s this family got against progress anyway? Although through the first war and up to about 1922 you could make some money from farming in Ohio, as Europe was all torn up and most of its food supply was coming from here. Farming was a going concern. I remember the horses, how big around their feet were, their sharp warm smell. How mother loved the horse called Captain, and would feed him apples from her hand.

  We lived on the farm for about five years, and it was when Bess was a baby that the gypsies came.

  Women cooked everything from scratch in those days of course, on the woodstove, so if you wanted to make a soup or stew, well it would take some time, and it was hot in the kitchen in the summer so you would put something on and leave it to go do some other chores.

  1924

  Blanchard County, Ohio

  It was a day like that, late summer when Mother had put a nice beef stew to cook on the stove and took the children out to the yard with her. Dad had driven into town that morning. She was hanging out the laundry by the side of the house admiring how nicely her flower border had come along on the side border this year, bachelor buttons, the blue was so noticeable, and phlox, the phlox just gave and gave its b
loom, since June it had, but the red zinnias clashed with the pinks and blues. Now the lilies you could smell even over here, so tall this year, and secretly, for she thought it sacrilegious, she held the inside of the lily flower as good proof for the glory of God as anything, the delicate pink stalks topped with the dangling umbrellas of pollen, there like a Chinese festival of abundance and rain. She noticed then how her white sheets seemed to be dancing in the wind as the children began pointing at the road. She heard the sound of a waltz come spinning across the grass with a carnival sound she knew was an accordion, met a few minutes later by the jingle of the bells on the wagon horses coming along the road. She could see them from the slight rise of the lawn to the side of the farmhouse, the back of the wagons covered over with green canvas and the bottom wood painted red like a circus. On the first wagon a young man was sitting up front next to the driver, swaying and singing as his hands played over the accordion keys, his words were in a strange language but it was a catching tune. The children clapped and ran to look closer, but Mother called them back, “No, now you stay. Right here.” There were three or four covered wagons. Some boys along the side led a string of horses. They often traded horses. Dad said you could always tell the stolen horses because those were the ones they were most eager to sell before the rightful owners a few counties back might catch up. They used to stop at the small pond down the road and camp there for a few nights. Some were metal smiths, tinkers you know, they would mend a broken pot handle or a harness, they weren’t all bad.

  Well mother stopped her laundry to look and called her collie dog that was barking at them terrible, back into the yard and held my hand while Aunt Jeanne hid behind her. One of the gypsy women saw her, and got off the wagon and came over pulling a flowered shawl around her shoulders. She said to Mother “I will sell you some pins for sewing.”

  “I don’t need any pins,” Mom said, “no thank you.”

  Well the woman kept patting Jeanne’s hair as she was very blonde, saying, “So yellow, so fat.”

  Then the woman called back to the wagon, and two skinny little barefoot girls came running over to her and she pushed them in front of Mother and said in decent English, “See how small, my children. So hungry.” She put her hand to her mouth gesturing, “Sooo hungry.” Well they did look awful skinny.

  Mom couldn’t bear the thought of anyone going hungry, but she didn’t have much on hand. She had some summer squash in the vegetable garden, and motioned to the woman to follow. She opened the wooden gate and put the children in front of her still wary, she picked an apron full of squash with the yellow blossoms still hanging on the tips all big and bright to give her. The gypsy woman took them in a flour sack she seemed to have been carrying along but she didn’t look very happy about it.

  “Hard to cook,” she said, and looked so upset.

  Then Mother said, “Well, if you bring your children back later I may have some stew for them.”

  That seemed to cheer them all up, and she thanked Mother and walked back toward the wagons, which were a little further down the road now.

  Mother finished hanging the laundry. She had Bess in her pram and me and Jeanne whose job it was to hand up the clothespins. She was careful to keep us all with her cause there were stories of gypsies stealing children though she didn’t really believe that as they seemed to have plenty of their own. Jeanne went into the house and brought out the book of fairy tales and Mother sat on the grass and read us Thumbelina. When we were finished we gathered up the basket and walked out to the chicken coop behind the house, where I was allowed to fill the water tank in the coop from a bucket by the pump; then she scattered some corn from the bottom of her apron pocket, stopped to tie Jeanne’s shoes and to pick a good handful of fresh parsley from the herb patch out the back door, then lifted Bess from her baby carriage and put her on her hip. As she started up the back porch steps she heard the front screen door slam and wondered what that was. Well she walked into her kitchen just in time to see the back side of that Gypsy woman hurrying down the front walk with her stew pot still steaming in her hands. Mom hurried out the front door after her but there was a wagon waiting right on the road out front, and a man helped the woman with the pot into the wagon and off they went at a good trot.

  Mother was livid, and walked after them yelling, “That’s not right, my husband will be after you.”

  She was carrying Bess in one hand and the parsley in the other, and in the midst of her anger she thought to herself ‘damn it now that stew’s not gonna taste right without the parsley,’ but that thought made her all the madder and she threw the parsley into the road and stamped it into the dust. They weren’t just taking her stew, you see but taking her chance to give it to them, was like they stole it twice, took her good pot and her good intentions too. She stood there in the middle of the road looking back at the house where Jeanne and I stood peering off the porch, and back down the road where the wagon was rolling, looking back and forth, stomping her feet and we didn’t know which way she was gonna go.

  Stay or leave us we didn’t know. And when you disappeared that time, it was like that. I didn’t know. You took something too. Well this is all related if you’ll just be patient. So many things are vivid now.

  July 2, 1976

  Blanchardville Hospital

  Was good of Jeanne to drive up from Columbus well of course she would be here right away. Saint Jeanne, my sister who never said an unkind word about anyone, and I don’t have to talk while we sit here. Is Mother dying, I think it may be. I didn’t expect it not this month of July, just had her 82nd birthday but at least I can imagine she will go to heaven because her devotion to Mary was absolute and Early Mass at 7 a.m. every Wednesday as well as Sunday, but my Stephanie, I don’t know where she is or will go. My baby girl. Where is it she has gone, not where the old go when the heart stops beating or starts again God’s will be done. Something else controlling where she is and I don’t know what it is. My mother’s body here, her hand bruised from the IV, her bony hand purple, but warm. She responds to my touch she squeezes my hand, her face is calm, almost smiling I think. But my daughter’s body, where is she, what if someone I have never seen would take her put their grubby hands on her. I can’t lose both. What then, more than a soul can bear. They say fluid is filling her lungs now, cardiac failure, heart disease, heart’s dis-ease. Would to God this had not. I sit when I can. Jeanne is here, thank God Jeanne is here. We’re just sitting with her, not much more that we can do.

  ·

  “Rose, have you heard anything today” Jeanne asks. Her voice is so gentle its gentleness catches in my throat, I clench my teeth to keep from crying, I do not want to sob by my Mother’s bedside.

  The pump of the respirator.

  “We think she went off with the older Taylor girl from across the street, she was in town with a boyfriend and they were on their way somewhere, left about the same time she did.”

  “Uh huh, I bet you’ll hear something soon.”

  The pump of the respirator, in and out as if wind is blowing my body away.

  “She doesn’t know Grandma’s here in the hospital does she?”

  “Well the day before she left Grandma was first admitted here, said she didn’t have anything to do and I said you can go visit your grandmother in the hospital…” but I couldn’t explain to Jeanne even.

  “The police said they’re looking of course.”

  “Chris said he would bring Bess out during his lunch hour.”

  “That’s good. Is Chris still working for Sunny Delight?”

  “I think so. So funny I never could stand the taste of that stuff. But I would never say that to him.”

  “No.”

  “She’s resting, should we go for a smoke in the cafeteria.”

  “You go Rose, but you should consider giving it up after this.”

  “I know Jeanne but not now.”