Marguerite (part three)
It all happened so quickly, the grandmothers were too late. They arrived separately at the kitchen just in time to see the truck disappearing down the lane.
“Rachel! Rachel!” cried Grandma Franz’s mother. “Someone's at the door!” Attired entirely in black, the passing of her dear late husband a burden she must daily bear, Faustina Cole (now our Great Grandmother) had poked her head into the kitchen from the dining room doorway, her white hair capped as always in a small black silk bonnet, with ruching and a restrained frill around her face. You and I called her Great-grandma Cole and she never spoke to us. She was very, very old.
They said she'd had thirteen children and our Grandma was the oldest, kept home from school Mondays and Tuesdays to do the washing. Surprising, then, that Grandma was able to graduate, do teacher training and become so well thought of in the small village where she was sent to serve. It was a source of satisfaction that the people from that village still came to seek her advice on every sort of matter!
The father of that brave brood was first a farmer but then, seeing the light, so to speak, began to spend more and more of his time as a lay preacher, calling in to various homes in his district and setting down for some small refreshment while he told them about the glories of God. They sometimes gave him a few vegetables from the garden or some of the butchering and who is to know whether it was in gratitude for his august opinion or out of concern for the children. Our grandmother thought her father knew everything and that, in addition to having a flame of red hair and beard, and a loving nature, he was holy.
Her mother, Faustina, was known for her beauty. You can see it in the photograph, the pose in profile. The house, though, was ramshackle, at the side of a rutted pathway that could scarcely be called a lane. The neighbors snickered at the broom she kept inside the front door. When an infrequent carriage went by, they said, she would run out and pretend to be sweeping.
The other grandmother, for there were already two grandmothers in this household, paused in the sitting room doorway that also led to the kitchen. She could hear the voices from here and deduced that it was all something to do with Charlie. She smiled to herself; she’d find out soon enough what was up. Her granddaughter would come to tell her the story.
It was like the game they always played, little girl running into the full skirts of her other grandmother, shrieking with excitement, fear and pleasure, her mother stalking determinedly behind, the old woman gathering her long plaid gingham dress around in mock shelter of the child. (It was not really suitable for widowhood, the stripe matching her still-green eyes.)
“Now what are you supposed to have done this time?” she pretended to scold while she looked up without expression at her daughter-in-law.
“Charlotte, come out.” The giggling stopped. A holding still took its place, waiting for the drama to unfold. The long moment stretched out without sound or movement; then a slow softening of the older woman’s lower lip began and spread to the corners of her mouth. Her eyebrows lifted and beneath them her eyes were almost pitying.
“Better go with your Mama, now,” she said and brought the child forward.
The other woman was already turning away. She had given up trying to reason with ignorant people who lacked the power of contemplation, who saw only advantage or defeat. It was not up to us to question God’s plan. As a teacher, she had discovered that there were those who are capable of rhetoric and discourse and those who are not. The little girl, like her older brother, was not. Though she’d prodded insistently, nothing was there in either of them of her own father’s intellectual prowess. Her son was only another amiable tow-head. And her mother-in-law!
At least the boy-child was beautiful. Perhaps the new baby will be a boy. She doesn’t expect to be loved by a female.
Charlie goes looking for her mother, surreptitiously...as if by accident... after while... reluctantly. She doesn’t call out; she won‘t be sorry! Mama will be in the garden or feeding the chickens or in the upstairs room. If she just keeps looking, Mama will be there somewhere. Little Grandma is counting stitches with her tiny hooks and doesn’t want to talk any more.
It had seemed to be the perfect solution. Earnest young church-goers (she was only two years older) each with a widowed mother whose other offspring had quickly scattered far and wide, the large Franz house with ample room for four adults, and two or three children if it came to that, well-located close to town and to the church and with the small farm surrounding it possibly sufficient to maintain them all if managed carefully. Rachel had been taking care of her mother and younger siblings since her father died. Nothing was left there but the ramshackle house, four children still at school, an old but sturdy horse, a cart, and a rusted plow. She sold the plow and waited until the children finished school.
It was Charlie and Cissa together, giggling, laughing, chasing, having to be indoors because wet snow had started to stick to the branches and the trees and the grass the way it does, making clumps that cling together at first then fall heavily, soggily to the ground. The girls’ breath fogged up the window as they stared to the outside of their prison. They drew the small letters they knew in the frost, bedecked with hearts, arrows, and stars.
Suddenly Charlie had an idea! It was snowing because it was almost Christmas! She knew her mother was so orderly, so planful, so organized, that somewhere in the house there were bound to be, already, presents! Her whole day sparked up. She grabbed Cissa’s hand and dragged her off protesting, “What? Why, Charlie?”
“Presents!” whispered Charlie.
They began without really thinking at the kitchen and pantry, down through the cellar door, then upstairs, flinging open doors and drawers, pulling curtains aside and squirreling under beds. A great flurry of hunting and laughing and flinging. At first, they carefully closed doors and replaced lids to cover their tracks, but as the pace accelerated, so did the trail of upset linens and boxes.
Their mother heard the commotion but she had learned to isolate herself from it. It came as if from far off. She calmed herself rather than the children. Not that she hadn’t tried to explain to them, especially Charlotte, being the older of the two, the way things needed to be done, how much of a problem her behavior was, but she could not seem to reach her. With the boy, Fredrick, she had felt such a strong connection, at least until he went to school. She’d taught him at home as long as her husband and mother-in-law would allow it, his soft hair grown long and curly, truly an angel.
School had changed all that. His hair was cut short and he answered her politely but did not meet her eyes. The grief stayed like a long icicle in her heart. She would not do that again.
Charlotte was different, in any case. From the beginning, she disrupted the schedule, tried out the rules, argued, tricked her older brother, her little sister, her mother. She was, in fact, exactly like her grandmother, Rachel’s mother-in-law. There was no help for it; it was inherited. When another girl was born, that was the end of that. No more babies. She made sure of it.
Clarissa was big for her age and Charlotte was small so it was not long before they were pretty well matched physically, a proposition they tested, not daily, but hourly. They fought, Cissa younger and bigger on top, then Charlie, seizing long braids in two fists to thump the other’s head against the ground. (My mother’s hand rises as if to touch a tender spot.) They rolled together like pups and sprang from the roil to run shrieking through the house of the two grandmothers, the carefully negotiating and organizing mother and the father who was out-numbered anyway. Grandmother despaired. Her mother shook her head sorrowfully prophesying doom and damnation. Down in the barn, the farmer hit the cow across the back with a iron bar when it refused the stall. His mother looked up from her crocheting in the green velvet platform rocker with a brief little cat smile.
In the end it was Charlie. Losing, she wouldn’t give up; winning, she wouldn’t stop beating. Cissa could always be tricked. Cissa loved her.
Charlotte ran around the back of the shed. She was not yet Charlie and never would be Lottie, which she thought was cheap. Her mother wouldn’t be coming after her. She had given up that game, tiny daughter quick and mother-in-law shrugging winking laughing. Now she simply removed them from her mind and went on with the work. If help had to be asked for, it wasn’t worth having. So her husband’s mother sat making lace or crocheting in the front room, rocking to and fro ever so slightly in the green velvet upholstered armchair. It was her house in which they lived! The other one, her own mother, leafed frantically through the worn black family Bible, pacing from room to room throughout the house as if to escape some impending disaster.
Grandma met it all with silence. God’s plan. Her duty to endure and enable them all to survive. The two old women could peel potatoes, shell peas, or dry dishes. They worked silently on opposite sides of the large kitchen, finishing without a word unless perhaps an observation.
“Snowing again!”
“Yes.”
Grandfather raged and got out the strap while the children rioted. He stormed amongst the three women. Working the farm and milking the cows, there was still barely enough to survive on. They got more chickens to sell the eggs. On Sunday mornings and Thursday nights, they went over to the little church they had attended all their lives. Grandmother put the money in the collection plate. On this she would brook no argument. She bundled up the worn-out clothes to send to China.
“Yeooow! Wahoo! Yipee!” The girls chorused like wild coyotes. They’d found brand new ice skates on the top shelf of the hall closet!
“Mamma! Mamma!” Charlie ran down the hallway to the kitchen. “Guess what! We found the Christmas presents! Cissa and me, we found the skates!!” She jumped up and down on the spot, excited, triumphant at winning the game. Rachel turned her head to look at her daughters. The eldest dangled a pair of silvery metal blades from her upstretched hand as she twirled around the room. Five-year-old Cissa stood back uncertainly, the second pair hanging to the floor in front of her. Their mother's hands fell to her sides making small dusty streaks on her apron.
"Let it go, Rachel." She seemed to hear her father's voice as he spoke before, his blue eyes gazing down intensely into her own. "Let it go and be forever free from anger! We are not animals, but the children of God." So gently had he smiled. "Each will be tried according to his ability. Each will contribute according to his gifts…"
She turned back to the mound of white yeasted flour in front of her; she said, “All right.”
“We’re going to put them on now!” challenged Charlie, “since we already know what we’re getting!”
“Yes,” said her mother. “The skates are your Christmas present. You may put them on now or wait until later if you wish.” She folded the dough and pushed it down hard with the heels of her hands. “There won’t be any other.” Charlie stood still for a moment, considering. No, this was obviously wrong. Everybody knew there were always presents at Christmas.
“C’mon!’ she called to Cissa as she raced back up the hall. “Let’s try them on then!”
Rachel did not tell her husband. He’d have to get out the strap and then be cross at her as if she'd made him do it and maybe because he wanted to punish her, too, for the rules, the maneuvering, the unraised voice that reasoned on and on, the end of sex, the need for money, her mother’s continual whine, the secret little smiles of his own maternal parent…and he a gentle person, a church man. If he noticed the skates, he didn’t ask.
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