Читать книгу Every Little Scrap and Wonder - Carla Funk - Страница 12

First God

I CAN STILL SEE them in their circle of hardback wooden chairs, heads bowed over the onionskin pages of the King James, those women of the Wednesday-morning Bible study. In church-soft voices, they read aloud from Psalms and Proverbs, the prophets and epistles, following a paper script with questions for discussion. While they prayed and softly spoke, I roamed the building freely. Downstairs, I marveled at the men’s urinals, flushed every toilet. Sprayed the can of aerosol deodorizer until the room smelled like a chemical bouquet. In the upstairs nursery, I crawled into a crib, trying to remember what it felt like to be a baby. I tugged the plastic cow by its string and made it moo. I stacked a tower of wooden blocks and made it topple. In the Sunday-school rooms, I snooped through stacks of coloured construction paper, sniffed the pots of white glue, stood at the front of the class and pretended I was the teacher, telling a flannelgraph story with boils, locusts, and blood.

Upstairs in the sanctuary, the women told their own stories, pored over the scriptures, sniffled into Kleenexes and touched one another’s hands, and prayed on. Afterward, there’d be fellowship in the basement kitchen, tea and weak coffee, friendship cake and matrimony squares and egg-salad sandwiches cut cleanly into triangles, but first, they studied, bent over their Bibles with the devotion of ancient scholars, these Anns and Tinas, Sarahs and Netties, grandmas and never-marrieds and stay-at-homes with school-aged kids. Among them, my mother, quiet, smoothed her skirt and bowed her head.

She was one of the church’s devout, a Wednesday-morning Bible study lady and a Tuesday-evening sewing circle member, a volunteer in the church nursery and a Sunday-school student in the adult class. Every morning at the breakfast table, she read to us from Devotions for the Family, a slim paperback she bought at Streams of Life, the Christian bookstore and gift shop run by the preacher’s wife. Monday through Friday, as my brother and I gummed our oatmeal and chewed our toast, we heard about Jack and Jeanie, twins who sinned, confessed, repented, and were forgiven, all within a two-minute story. At the end of it, she read the daily Bible verse, which we repeated back to her until we could say it without mistakes. Sometimes, before the breakfast devotional, I’d stand at my mother’s bedroom door, peeking through the crack to see her kneeling by her bed, forehead propped on her clasped hands, slim black Bible lying open beside her. Then she’d rise, run through her exercises—toe touches and bicycle legs pedalling in the air as she lay on her back, counting aloud through her panting and puffing.

She was, I believed, exactly the woman King Solomon described in the book of Proverbs, the one worth far more than rubies. Like that Proverbs 31 woman with her litany of virtues, my mother provided food, worked with her hands, tilled the field, kept her clothes clean and mended. While it was still night, she rose to pack my dad’s lunch and make his breakfast, then see him off for another long shift. After he drove away into the dark, she crawled back into bed and I snuck in beside her, taking my dad’s place, rubbing my bare feet along her stubbly calves until I fell asleep.

Like that virtuous woman, she even sought out wool and flax—or at least the wool. Afternoons, in the coolness of the basement, she worked through the black plastic garbage bag full of last year’s wool, shorn off an old ewe. What was destined for the dump, my mother collected gladly. On the wire bristles of one of her carding brushes, she set a clump of dirt-specked wool, and with the other wood-handled brush, dragged the fibres across the bristles. The ball of wool untangled into wisps. With each brush, the wool loosened and lifted from the bottom carding brush to the top one. The grit, bugs, and flecks of sawdust fell away until a tiny cirrus puff rested on her aproned lap. When she dropped it into the stainless-steel washtub, it seemed to hover a moment, floating on the furnace’s draft. If, on a breezeless early-autumn afternoon, the sun was high and hot enough, she filled the washtub with warm water, and with a sliver of soap whittled from a block passed down through the family—soap that smelled of tallow and lye, ashes and birch trees—she scrubbed each fleecy cloud. Wet and washed, the wool perfumed the air with its animal history. Wrung out, it hung limp. But laid out on a faded bedsheet on the grass, the wool bleached white in the light until the back lawn looked like a pasture haunted by the ghosts of sheep.

Every night, before she tucked me and my brother beneath quilts filled with that wool, she sat on the bed, wedged between our pajama-clad bodies, and read aloud to us in a voice that rose and fell with the story’s tension. When she read from Little House in the Big Woods, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to live inside the one-room cabin in the Wisconsin woods, to hear the wolves howl at night and have a bulldog named Jack that turned three times before settling by the fire to sleep, to have a Pa that played the fiddle as the blizzard winds blew. When she read Heidi, I dreamed a ladder to an attic bedroom and the mountain at my back, bluebells and alpine flowers, the crisp, clear air and goat-Peter singing down the trail to the village. When she read us all the way to Narnia, to Aslan tied down on the stone table and his mane shorn away, I bit the inside of my cheek until I lay in the dark alone, then sobbed into my pillow, not yet knowing how the story would end. When she read from Uncle Arthur of the mother who ran back into her burning house to save her sleeping baby, and of how in the morning the firemen found the two in each other’s arms, burned to death, I imagined myself curled in my fiery bedroom, lying on the beige shag rug lit with sparks, and could see her crawling through the hallway dripping with flames, calling my name through the smoke.

I believed she was strong enough to save me from any danger. When she hoisted the axe above her head and cracked it down on a block of wood, those rounds of pine and fir split easily, over and over, in halves, then quarters, then cleaved to eighths. Show us your muscles, my brother and I would say. She shooed us away, told us to haul what she’d split, but we kept begging, please, just show us, until finally, she lifted one sleeve and flexed, her bicep a white bulge threaded with turquoise. And when we called her Popeye, she tugged the shirtsleeve down, shook her head and rolled her eyes, then picked up the axe and swung it down again.

Every time I called her name—Mom, Mom—the soft solo syllable, part hum, part cry, she appeared like magic. Every time I called—Mom—a miracle, a backlit shadow. When, in my bedroom, the mosquitoes whined and wheedled around my face, needling my sleep with blood-threat and itch, and from beneath the blankets I called Mom, she stood in her nightgown in the doorway, holding out the can of Raid. Cover your head, she said, and I ducked beneath the covers, burrowed down deep and sealed myself off from the aerosol hiss she sprayed above me, around me, across the whole room. She pulled the covers up to my chin. Goodnight, she said. Sleep tight, I said. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. In call and response, we back-and-forthed the rhyme, and then she bent to recite with me our bedtime prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep—our voices moving quickly through the liturgy, its cadence as familiar as my mother’s night-time smell of talcum and soap.

First god, woman above all other women, mother of all mothers, she was the one I reached for first inside the Wednesday-morning huddle of praying ladies. Against my mother’s warning, I’d gone roaming outside the sanctuary, had tried to pick a scruffy bouquet from the weeds in the ditch between the parking lot and road, but instead had come back with mud-crusted knees and white socks hooked with burrs. My quest for brighter fireweed and fatter rosehips had drawn me down toward the boggy culvert, and I’d fallen, twice, struggling up the slope of the ditch and back into the church. I tried not to cry, but as soon as the women looked at me, filthy and on the verge of tears, and their eyes went kind and their tongues clucked with compassion, I broke. I reached for my mother, and she reached for me, enfolding me into a perfume of Avon lotion and spearmint gum. The other women bent down around us and with a flurry of hands began to wipe away the mud from my knees, dabbing at the dirt and scrapes with tissues, plucking off the burrs stuck to my socks. While I cried into my mother’s shoulder, they tended to me, murmuring a gentleness without words until my shuddered sobs calmed to breathing and they had removed the evidence of my fall. How far I’d strayed outside the boundaries, how shameful the filth, how worthless my now-wilted clutch of autumn weeds lying at my feet—these humiliations faded as I stood inside the circle of their low and soothing voices.

“Look,” said Old Mrs. Wiens, pointing to my white socks. “All clean.” She held open her handkerchief. Each Nettie, Sarah, Tina, and Ann poured in a handful of burrs. Old Mrs. Wiens tucked it in the pocket of her black cardigan and touched my cheek with her cool, blue-veined hand.

“Now,” said my mother, licking her thumb to wipe dirt from my mouth, “let’s go have something to eat.”