The Robber Bride (39 page)

“Maybe I should’ve sent him back to the Mennonites,” she says. “He might like to be with his own people. But most likely they wouldn’t’ve took him. Anyways, he’s best here with me.”

Grandmother’s own name is carved underneath his, but her right-hand date is a blank. “I had to get it fixed beforehand,” she says to Karen. “Nobody around here to do it, after. That Gloria and that Vi would probably just dump me into the ditch, save the money. They’re waiting for me to die so they can sell the farm. Or else they’d move me into that city, some hole in the ground. So I fooled them, I bought my own gravestone. I’m all set, come hell or high water.”

“I don’t want you to die,” says Karen. She doesn’t. Her grandmother is a safe place for her, although hard. Or because hard. Not shifting, not watery. She doesn’t change.

Her grandmother sticks out her chin. “I don’t intend to die,” she says. “Only the body dies.” She glares at Karen; she looks almost ferocious. Her hair on top is like thistles, after they’ve gone to seed.

Did Karen love her grandmother? thinks Charis, halfway to the Island, sitting at the back of the ferry, remembering herself remembering. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Love is too simple a word for such a mixture of harsh and soft colours, of pungent tastes and rasping edges. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” her grandmother would say, and Karen would flinch, because she could picture her grandmother actually skinning one. Her grandmother went out at dawn with her .22 rifle and shot woodchucks; also rabbits, which she made into stews. She killed the chickens when they were too old to lay or just when she wanted a chicken; she chopped their heads off with an axe, on the wooden chopping block, and they ran silently around the barnyard with their necks fountaining blood and the grey smoke of their life rising up from them and the rainbow of light around them fading and then going out. Then she plucked and gutted them and singed off their pinfeathers with a candle, and after
they were cooked she saved their wishbones and dried them on the windowsill. She had five there already. Karen wanted them to break one, but her grandmother said, “Have you got a wish?” and Karen couldn’t think of one. “You save these for when you need them,” said her grandmother.

Karen asks more questions now; she does more things. Her grandmother says she is toughening up. When she goes to the henhouse by herself to get the eggs, she swats at the hens if they hiss and try to peck her, and if the rooster jumps at her bare legs she kicks him; sometimes she carries a stick, to beat him off. “He’s a mean old devil,” her grandmother says. “Don’t you take anything from him. Just give him a good whack. He’ll respect you for it.”

One morning they’re eating bacon, and her grandmother says, “This here is Pinky.”

“Pinky?” says Karen. Pinky the pig is lying on her afghan where she usually is during meals, blinking with her bristly-lashed eyes and hoping for scraps. “Pinky’s right here!”

“This is last year’s Pinky,” says her grandmother. “There’s a new one every year.” She looks across the table at Karen. She has a sly expression; she’s waiting to see how Karen will take it.

Karen doesn’t know what to do. She could start to cry and jump up from the table and run out of the room, which is what her mother would do and is also what she herself feels like doing. Instead she sets her fork down and takes the rubbery chewed piece of bacon out of her mouth and places it gently on her plate, and that’s the end of bacon for her, right then and there, forever.

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says her grandmother, aggrieved but with some contempt. It’s as if Karen has failed at something. “It’s only pigs. They’re cute when they’re young, smart too, but if I let them stay alive they’d get too big. They’re wild when they grow up,
they’re cunning, they’d eat you, yourself. They’d gobble you up as soon as look at you!”

Karen thinks about Pinky, running around the barnyard with no head, the grey smoke of her life going up from her and her rainbow light shrinking to nothing. Whatever else, her grandmother is a killer. No wonder other people are afraid of her.

35

I
t was Labour Day. That was when Karen’s mother was supposed to come on the train and take Karen back to the city. Karen had her suitcase all packed. She cried, in her narrow bed, under her chenille spread, under her pillow. She didn’t want to leave her grandmother, but she wanted to see her mother, who – already – she couldn’t remember clearly. All she could remember was her dresses, and the smell of Tabu, and one of her voices, her sweet voice, the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos.

Her mother didn’t come. Instead there was a phone call from Aunt Vi, and Karen’s grandmother said there had been a hitch and Karen would be staying a little longer. “You can help me put up the tomatoes,” she said. Karen picked tomatoes and washed them in the pantry, and her grandmother scalded them and peeled them and boiled them in jars.

Then it was time for school to begin, and still nothing happened. “There’s no point starting you at that school,” said Karen’s grandmother. “You’d just be in and out.” Karen didn’t mind. She didn’t
much like school anyway, it was hard to pay attention to so many people in the same room at once. It was like the radio when there was a thunderstorm near: she could hardly hear a thing.

Her grandmother brought the Bible out of the front parlour and stood it on the kitchen table. “Let me see, said the blind man,” she said. She closed her eyes and poked with a pin. “Psalm Eighty-eight. I’ve had that before. ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.’ Well, that’s right enough; it means I should get ready to go, myself, pretty soon. Now you.”

Karen took the pin and closed her eyes, and her hand followed the strong current that pulled it downwards. “Ah,” said her grandmother, squinting. “Jezebel again. Revelations, Two, Twenty. ‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which callest herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.’ Now that’s a strange thing, for a little girl.” And she smiled at Karen, the smile of a withered apple. “You must be living ahead of yourself.” Karen had no idea what she meant.

Finally it was Aunt Vi who arrived, not Karen’s mother. She didn’t even stay at the grandmother’s house. She stayed at the one hotel in town, and the grandmother drove Karen in. Karen didn’t sit in the back of the truck this time. She sat in the front seat with the dog hairs, wearing her dress, the same as the day she came, looking out the window and not saying a thing. Her grandmother whistled softly.

Aunt Vi wasn’t all that pleased to see Karen but she pretended to be. She gave Karen a peck on the cheek. “Look how tall you’ve grown!” she said. It sounded like an accusation. “You’ve got her suitcase?” she said to the grandmother.

“Viola, I’m hardly senile yet,” said the grandmother. “I’m not likely to forget her suitcase. Here you go,” she said to Karen softly.
“I put a wishbone in it.” She crouched down and put her bony arms around Karen, and Karen could feel her square body, solid as a house, and then her grandmother wasn’t there any longer.

Karen sat on the train beside Aunt Vi, who fussed and fussed. “We’ll have to get you enrolled in school, right away,” she said. “You’ve missed almost a month already! My goodness, you’re brown as a berry!”

“Where’s my mother?” said Karen. She couldn’t think of any berries that were brown.

Aunt Vi frowned and looked away. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said.

When Karen got to Aunt Vi’s house she went into her usual room with the orange-and-pink flowered curtains and opened up her suitcase right away. There was the hen wishbone, wrapped in a piece of wax paper, with a rubber band around it, from her grandmother’s jar of saved-up rubber bands that was kept beside the sink. She took the wishbone out. It smelled sour, but rich and full, like a hand with dirt on it. She hid it in the hem of one of the curtains. She knew that if Aunt Vi found it she would throw it away.

Karen’s mother is in a building, a new flat yellow building that looks like a school. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern take Karen to visit her. They sit in the waiting room, on hard chairs covered with a nubbly fabric, and Karen is frightened because Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are so solemn; solemn, and at the same time avid. They are like the people who stop their cars and get out to see when there’s been a car accident. Something is bad, something is wrong, but they want to participate in it, whatever it is. Karen would rather not, she would like to go back right now, back in time, back as far as the farm, but a door opens and her mother comes into the room. She walks slowly, putting a hand out to touch the furniture as if to guide herself.
Sleepwalking
, thinks Karen. Before, her mother’s fingers were slim,
the nails polished. She was proud of her hands. But now her hands are swollen and clumsy and there is no ring any more on her wedding finger. She’s wearing a grey housecoat and slippers that Karen has never seen before, and also she has never before seen her mother’s face.

Not this face. It’s a flat face with a dull shine on it, like the dead fish in the white enamel trays at the fish store. A fading light, silvery, like scales. She turns this face towards Karen; it’s expressionless as a plate. Eyes of china. Suddenly Karen is framed in those eyes, a small pale girl sitting on a nubbly chair, a girl her mother has never seen before. Karen brings her two hands up to her mouth and breathes in, a gasp, the reverse of a scream.

“Gloria. How’re you feeling?” says Uncle Vern.

Karen’s mother’s head swings towards him, a ponderous head, heavy. The hair on it is pulled back, held with clips. Karen’s mother used to do her hair up in pincurls, and when she combed it out it would be wavy. This hair is plain and straight, and filmed over, as if it’s been kept in a cupboard. Karen thinks about her grandmother’s root cellar, with its smell of indoor earth and its rows of preserve bottles, bright berries glassed over, powdered with dust.

“Fine,” says Karen’s mother, after a minute.

“I can’t stand it,” says Aunt Vi. She dabs at her eyes with a hankie. Then, in a firmer voice: “Karen, aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?”

Aunt Vi’s questions are like orders. Karen slides off her chair and goes over to this woman. She doesn’t put her arms around her, she doesn’t touch her with her hands. She bends her body from the waist and places her lips against the woman’s cheek. She hardly presses at all, but her mouth sinks in and down, on the cheek that is like cool rubber. She thinks of Pinky without a head, collapsing in the barnyard, becoming ham. Her mother has the texture of luncheon meat. She feels sick to her stomach.

Her mother receives the kiss passively. Karen steps back. There is no red light around her mother now. Only a faint mauve-brown shimmer.

In the car on the way home, Karen sits between Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern instead of in the back where she usually sits. Aunt Vi wipes at her eyes. Uncle Vern asks Karen if she wants an ice cream cone. She says no thank you, and he pats her knee.

“I felt so bad, my own little sister; but I had to do it,” Aunt Vi says, on the phone. “It was the third time, and what could I do? I don’t know where she got them! Lucky the empty bottle was right there beside her so at least we could tell the doctor what she took. It’s just a wonder we were in time. Something in her voice, I guess; well, it’s not like I hadn’t heard it before! When we got there she was out cold. She had bruises on her mouth for weeks, they had to pry it open to get the hose down, and today it was like you wouldn’t of known her. I don’t know – shock treatments, I guess. If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to do an operation.” She says
operation
in that solemn voice, the voice she uses for saying grace, as if it’s a holy word. She wants it, this operation, Karen can tell. If her mother has an operation, some of that holiness will rub off on Aunt Vi.

Karen went to school, where she said little and did not make friends. She was not teased either, she was mostly ignored. She knew how to do that, make herself invisible. All she had to do was to suck in the light around her body; it was like sucking in her breath. When the teacher looked at her the look went right through, to whoever was sitting behind her. This way Karen hardly needed to be in the classroom at all. She let her hands do whatever was required: long rows of a’s and b’s, neat columns of numbers. She got gold stars for neatness. Her paper snowflake and her paper tulip were among the ten pinned up on the corkboard.

Every week, then every two weeks, then every three, she went with her aunt and uncle to visit her mother. Her mother was in a different hospital now. “Your mother is very ill,” Aunt Vi told her, but Karen didn’t need to be told. She could see the illness spreading on her mother’s skin, like the hairs on arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lightning, only very small and slow. Like grey mould spreading through bread. When her mother was veined through and through like that, then she would die. Nobody could stop her, because that was what she wanted to do.

Karen thought about using her wishbone but she knew it wouldn’t be any good. To make a wish work you had to really want it, and she didn’t want this woman to stay alive. If she could have had her mother back the way she was before, during the good times, yes. But she knew this was impossible. There wasn’t enough of that mother left. So she kept the wishbone in the hem of the curtain, checking once in a while to make sure it was still there.

Karen sat in her room. Sometimes she banged her head softly against the wall, so she wouldn’t have to think. Or she looked out the window a lot. Or she looked out the window at school. What she looked at was the sky. She thought about the summer. Maybe next summer her aunt and uncle would go on a vacation and she could be back at her grandmother’s farm, gathering the eggs, picking yellow beans in the sun.

On her eighth birthday Karen has a cake. Aunt Vi has baked it, and put sugar roses on it from the store, and eight candles. She asks Karen if she wants to have a little friend over, but Karen says no. So they eat the birthday dinner by themselves, the three of them,
Oh Lord, bless this food to our use, Amen
, and there are tuna and egg salad sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly, and Aunt Vi says, “Isn’t this nice,” and then there is Neapolitan ice cream in three colours, white,
pink, and brown. After that the cake. Aunt Vi lights the candles and tells Karen to blow them out and make a wish, but Karen just sits there, looking at the flames.