The Seary Line (5 page)

“My, aren't you a pretty little girl,” one snickered.

“Little girl?” howled another.

“She looks right like a proper lady to me.”

“Lovely, grand,” said the third after a low shrill whistle.

“Now, fellers,” the storeowner cautioned. “Leave the Seary girl alone. And get on about your day. This is a business, not a hang-out.”

A curious pride sprang up inside Miriam. She was scraping the five-foot mark, and as she passed through the cluster of men, one holding open the door, she tried her best to straighten out her hump. After that, she was eager to run errands, and Miss Hood began to joke, saying Miriam was doing fine after all with three handsome
gentlemen suitors at her beck and call.

They were always there. At the general store. Sometimes, as she passed amongst them, they would poke her in the chest, run a hand or two down over her rump, but it was only in fun. They were always smirking and Miriam liked that. Liked that a lot.

One summery afternoon, they asked her if she would like to go for a walk. Even though Miriam had heard of this before, remembered when her cousin Sally went for Sunday walks with a brown-haired boy, she was still unprepared for the thrill that rushed in. They led her through a thicket of leafy dogwood trees and out into the middle of an overgrown field of wild grass. The Billys crouched down and patted a flattened area for Miriam.

“We idn't going grassing, is we?” Miriam asked. She understood from overhearing conversations between her cousin and aunt that strolling was fine, but grassing was naughty.

Bursts of laughter erupted from the three Billys, they smacked their legs.

“Christ, she's a card,” they said amongst themselves. “Grassing. Is we going grassing, she asks. She idn't blunt, is she?”

Miriam watched the spectacle. It was the first time she recalled being so funny, and so she sang through her crooked smile, “A grassin' we will go, a grassin' we will go. Hi ho the dairy oh, a grassin' we will go.”

More laughter, and Billy Targate rolled backwards onto the knobby ground, his watery eyes almost crossed.

Billy Gosse wiped his face and cleared his throat. More serious now, focused in on Miriam. “What do you like to do, missus? You knows, to have a bit of fun.”

She paused, stuck her tongue out onto her bottom
lip. “I loves butter,” she said, and then blushed. “Milking the old girls. Churning up the cream. Churning.”

“Uh-huh.” Nodding.

“Sometimes when I's helping Miss Hood, I gets it on my hands, and I licks my fingers.”

“She likes licking, fellers,” Billy Keilly said, but Billy Gosse swatted him on the back of his head, said to Miriam, “Churning, hey?”

“Uh-huh.”

Billy Gosse chewed skin from the cuticle on his thumb, spat the fleck over his shoulder, and eyed the blood that flooded his nail bed. “Might you want to try a different way to churn now, missus?”

“Umm.”

“A real special way?”

“Umm. All right?”

“The best butter in the world is when a feller churns with a missus. Did you know that?”

Miriam shook her head.

“Well, 'tis true. That makes the sweetest butter.”

“Miss Hood's butter is right sweet. She makes butter flowers for me to eat. And I loves them.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want to make some other butter?”

Miriam nodded. “I loves butter.”

“You can count on us.”

“We've all done this hundreds of times,” Billy Keilly announced just before receiving a second, sharper swat.

Miriam nodded again.

“But to make this special butter, you got to lie down. Can't churn sitting up, maid.” Guffaws.

As Miriam leaned back on her elbows, he flashed her a
wet grin, and she did the same without even realizing it.

“You got to go like this.”

She did.

“And haul down those.”

And she did that too.

One of the Billys climbed on top of her while the other two watched intently. He began to move his hips, using what he explained was his own personal plunger. She spread her arms out, let her fingers wander through the cool grass on either side of her body. It all began to make sense. Those feelings she had when churning for Miss Hood, now churning with a Billy.

“This is hard work,” he said as he grunted. “Churning. Churning.”

“I loves butter,” Miriam cried out shortly after the second Billy began his work. “Oooo. Butt-errrrrr.”

Over that summer, Miriam couldn't quite understand what had happened to her, what was happening to her. Her hair lost its soft curl, she developed strange bruises upon her bottom and thighs, and her lips were often chapped. Plus she had a powerful ache in her hump that was never there before.

Miss Hood never took the time to address the summer romps, simply announced one day that Miriam was going to leave. “That business. 'Twas bound to happen,” she said, as Miriam placed her neatly folded belongings into her dead mother's trunk. “Bound.”

Not long afterwards, Miriam Seary landed on the doorstep of Uncle and his wife Berta. They had long since given up
taking in orphaned or unwanted children, but Berta had expressed the desire for additional companionship, another woman about the house, and Uncle had readily agreed. Though the girl had had some troubles, she said, Berta's cousin described Miriam as being a quiet, hard-working woman who was eternally pleasant.

Miriam was nearly twenty-three when she pressed her bulk into the closet-sized room on the main floor of Uncle's home. This presented an immediate problem as Miriam's body was composed of a significant amount of material. Mounds and mounds of it. After butter, her second love was sugar. She revered it, sucked her fingers and jammed them into the middle-sized canister as often as she could without getting caught. One of the things she missed most about living with Miss Hood was the sticks of candy the Billys used to offer her after they churned. Either mint or lemon flavoured, a green or yellow swirl would always give it away. Sometimes they were sticky from being sampled, but tasted just fine nevertheless.

Though she didn't notice, Uncle's face adopted a severe look when he first saw her. A woman of such mass and twisted proportions would be little help on the farm, he decided. She was even larger than his wife. Very likely she would consume as much food as all of them combined, and he knew he would smell her sweat in the summer heat just as he smelled his wife's – all things that turned his sensitive stomach – but he kept his inner eye on his most coveted wish and did his best to accept all that she was.

Uncle was in the porch washing his muddy hands when he heard Berta speaking to the new girl. Uncle envisioned his wife's words as rotting leaves of cabbage and, as he lathered brown soapy scum between his fingers, he imagined hoeing them into the ground. So many years of scolding he'd
endured, every move berated. Over the course of their marriage, everything had become his fault – even the weather, which never seemed to satisfy her. He rinsed quietly, dried on an old rag, and peered through the door left ajar.

“So lovely to have a woman in the house,” Berta clucked as Miriam lay dinner plates around the sturdy harvest table. “A wonderful comfort to me, it is. A wonderful comfort.”

Miriam grinned, snorted lightly.

“Do you know I had nine sisters?” Berta continued as she dredged the last piece of damp fish in flour, slid it into the crackling pan. “No, of course you don't,” she said. “Six passed on now, but you can imagine I was used to having women about the house. The chatter. Don't seem right living with just a couple of men.”

Miriam nodded, said, “Uh-huh.” Then she plucked up the forks and laid them to the right of each plate.

“It's to the left, dear,” Berta whispered, shaking a floury hand towards the table. “To the left.”

Miriam twisted slowly, grimaced, a spring forced to uncoil.

“Ah, never mind,” Berta said. She wiped her hands in her apron and returned to her fish fillets. The edges were slightly burnt, and she moved the pan to a cooler section of the stove. “The table looks lovely. You did a grand job.”

Moving swiftly around her kitchen, Berta placed a fluted dish of beet on the table, dumped the steaming boiled potatoes into a bowl. “Eldred is a nice man though. Real gentlemanly. Don't know how that happened, considering the way he was raised. Mother had a streak in her, beyond mean. Used to beat the daylights out of him, always outside, just in case he lost control of hisself, I reckons.”

A sneeze erupted in the porch.

“Well, we's all set.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just in time too. His Lordship is home.”

At dinner, Uncle sat at the head of the table, lifted his hands for the prayer. Afterwards, he cleared his throat, said to Miriam, “Have you met Eldred yet?”

She leaned over in an odd way, giggled as she glanced quickly at Eldred without moving her head. Uncle felt a distressing jolt of excitement over the meeting, and considered changing the seating so that if Eldred should gaze upon Miriam, the dreadful bulge on her back might not be so noticeable.

“We all knows who Eldred is,” Berta snapped. “I told her this morning.”

“He's my best worker,” Uncle continued as he unwittingly adjusted his posture.

Berta's eyes narrowed. “He's your only worker.”

“That too, missus. And he plays the piano. Taught hisself.”

“She would've figured that out.”

“Folks come for miles around to listen to him. Sits right outside the window in the summers. Beautiful music. He's got a lot of talent, he do.”

“Awfully chatty today, Father.”

“And he don't always eat like that,” Uncle added, as Eldred hunched over in his seat, only inches between plate and mouth.

“That's an absolute lie,” Berta shrieked. “Don't heed a word that old man says. Eldred's been like that since he come into this house. We tried to break him of it now, teach him right. But, well. Eats like he thinks someone is going to
steal his food. I allows he looks even worse perched next to a pick and nibble person like myself.”

Uncle stared at his wife through watery eyes, kept his face calm while a sneer spread inside of him. That was one thing he always despised about his wife. She was not an honest eater. Every meal they shared, she poked at her food, scraped it across her plate. Each morsel would spend an eternity inside her mouth, chewed and chewed into paste, before being washed down with a dainty sip of water. But still, somehow when he was out of sight, she managed to cultivate and nourish a weight that frightened him. When they first married, he had craved those curves, cherished how each place on her body filled his empty hands, blurred his mind. Now those pounds threatened him, could smother him, make him vanish. Every night, while kneeling in prayer, he thanked the Lord above for the significant mattress bulge that separated them while they slept.

Berta looked up from her plate, stared back at him, and he felt her scrutiny like a mildewed cloth over his face.

“Just trying to make her welcome, missus,” he said.

“A moment to take a bite might be helpful, Father.”

The remainder of the meal was eaten in silence, other than Uncle's constant humming – a necessary diversion he'd adopted years ago so that he wouldn't hear his wife's chewing, bovine teeth moving through fodder.