The Memento (3 page)

Before Ma worked as a maid over at Petal’s End, she made her living working on the shore picking dulse and collecting fish in the weirs. Grampie told me that. Ma hated to speak of the past so
Grampie kept the memories for her and shared some with me over the years I lived with him. After Ma quit being a maid, she went back to work on the shore for a time. Then she wouldn’t go beyond the beach, nowhere near the salt water, and instead worked on farms picking fruit and vegetables as each season unfolded. At dawn, if she wasn’t parched from drinking, she’d pick buckets of water lilies and fish trout at the lake, selling her harvest down in the valley stores.

In earlier times women took their children right out into the field, but no one did that by the time I was a young child, except Ma. No one minded for I was no trouble. My earliest recollections of life with my mother are of playing and running about, napping on a blanket in the shade. Ma would have lunch packed for us and she’d sing as she worked. When she wasn’t doing farm work she’d make wild fruit jams and pickles and pies. Grampie had pictures in his album of us selling them by the side of the road and at tourist shops. He said Ma was as famous for her jellies and baking as she had once been for her needlework. She made her own labels. She’d embroider her name and the name of the jelly or jam, and she’d glue the muslin label to a glass jar with a shiny metal top, wrapping a thin silk ribbon around it. Everyone said it was a tie between how good her preserves tasted and how pretty them jars were. We’d go all over the mountain and the valley to her secret spots for picking wild berries. Ma not only had two kinds of outfits, she also had two sorts of smells—the sweet fragrance of sun-warmed skin and berries, and cigarette smoke, hairspray and rose perfume. In those early summers of my life it was mostly the berries, and the earthy rich scent of her hands that would stroke my hair and show me how to make flower garlands we’d wear on our heads. I have fragmented memories of other times, when she would make home deliveries to men and I would sit in the car waiting for her. When she’d come back Ma would reek of liquor. She’d light up a cigarette and the smoke would slither through the car and out the windows in an all too familiar way.

In the winter we’d sit by the fire while Ma taught me to embroider samplers, pictures with your name and date stitched. Young girls did these long ago to demonstrate their domestic skills, when embroidery was needed to put names and dates on clothes and linens, sacks of flour and grain. But then times changed and samplers were nothing more than pictorials to please the eye or stitching for decoration. Grampie told me when Ma worked as a maid at Petal’s End she’d done designs and stitching on their linens. He said I never had any interest in doing that even when I was little, just making my embroidery pictorials. Ma would show me how to stitch those same flowers we’d picked and played with in the good weather. She loved my pictures. But none of it lasted, and Grampie said each summer ended with her mind darker, leading us into cold, harsh winters. So it went on until she crashed the car and they took me away.

Except there Ma is on my twelfth birthday, still thinking she knows best, never wanting to accept that her own bad choices were what made life bitter and broken.

“You look at me,” Ma says.

I do as she bids. Her eyes are undulating red jellies.

“He did, he did it for so many. Your grandfather sipped the tea and he saw their faces and he gave that to them, those they left behind. But he wouldn’t for me. No ma’am. He wanted to punish me. He said John Lee never came to him, not once. I never got nothing. I brought his baby cup, that small mug with the silver moon and the golden stars. I gave it to your grandfather, I put it in his big hand myself and watched them paint-stained fingers take it away. You seen it there, Fancy, I know you did. Be a good girl now and you tell your Mama. You tell her the truth. I won’t be mad. You need to believe, that’s all. You didn’t believe in the spring but you were not yet twelve. It was too soon. But the time has come.”

My scar burns but I don’t touch it, just pull my hair over my face. It’s like we are together again, me in my pink dress picking
wild blueberries by the train tracks at sunset when I should have been in bed. Ma holding me up so I could try to grab a handful of the pink sky. Tears fill my eyes.

“Don’t you cry, Fancy Mosher. Don’t you dare,” Ma whispers. “I’m the one who deserves to cry. You listened to your Grampie for too long. He took you from me. Now he’s gone and you can listen to Mama again, and make me happy. Loretta will fill your mind with stories that are corrupted. But you know I’ll tell you true. John Lee might have died when he was only six years old but he’s more alive to me than you are. I see him there in my mind each moment of the day, my dearest treasure. And time and time again lying there on the rocks.”

I remember seeing that baby mug sitting on the shelf.
That was your little brother’s
, Grampie said.
We keep it as a memento. He was a sweet child
. At that moment I do want to make her happy, because she never was, not for long, not even when my hands were full of the pink sky and she’d laugh like it was the most adorable thing. And now, I think, all she wants is a cup and I can’t give her no cup.

“Oh, John Lee, little Johnny Lee.” When she says my brother’s name this time she starts crying in a horrible, small, breaking voice. Art takes an awkward step up but stops when Ma puts her smudged face in her hands. She lifts up her head and looks me right in the eye and waggles her long finger as she bawls. “What you don’t know is that you’re just like your Grampie. Oh yes you are. You’re the twelfth-born, just like him. Today you turn twelve years old. But this is my day.” She stops crying and barks at me. “And this year you
will
see what your Grampie could see and you will see your little brother for me and you goddamn
will
speak with him because that is what you were born to do. It’s the only reason I had you. Jesus had twelve disciples and so twelve is no ordinary number. Your grandfather said I wasn’t supposed to tell you. He made me promise. But who went and made that bastard lord and master?”

Ma’s chanting. I’m standing up, shaking, and Art is now beside me. Kids have gathered at the bottom of the concrete staircase, watching us, whispering, giggling. Ma is weeping. I can’t keep up with her.

“Oh, Mama,” I whisper. “What can I do so you’ll stop crying?”

“That’s right, Fancy. Help your Mama. You will see him. You will see my little boy and you will make it right between us. It wasn’t my fault. John Lee will forgive me. He already has, I know it. He was his Mama’s boy. He just can’t tell me himself. But he can give you a message, if you find him.”

Ma puts her finger up to her lips. “Hush-a-bye,” she coos, just like at Grampie’s burial. “Don’t you dare cry, Fancy Mosher.”

Art is my protector, standing between me and Ma in all her raging drunken glory. He is a young boy, tall and thin and brave. He tries to be a barrier but Ma shoves him out of the way with her strong hands as though he is no more than a reed in a pond where she is picking water lilies.

Art had come to Petal’s End to live with his grandmother, Yvette. Art was kind and he was rational. He noticed the small things. He was the type who would glance through a small gabled window and in that moment see the shooting star in the sky. When we walked in puddles when it rained he never went around them, not even when he was a grown man. He went right through in his rubber boots, me walking ahead in bare feet, listening to his ripples. Grampie said we shared the ability to understand in a glance.

Art understood that this was extreme, even for Ma. She’d been bad in the early spring but not like this.

In a flash my mother had my head between her hands, her rank breath in my face, the smell of cigarettes in my nostrils as she ran her nicotine-stained fingers over my scar, repeating as if in a trance that she didn’t mean for it to happen, she didn’t know how it happened to John Lee, she should have been there.

Art was pleading in his songbird voice, “Mrs. Mosher, Mrs. Mosher, let Fancy go. You need to sit down. You need to sit down. We need a time-out here, a time-out.”

She hated being called Mrs. Mosher. She was never married, for one thing, and said she’d never marry, for no man would keep her down. Being called Mrs. Mosher made her feel Stone Age old, and there was nothing she liked less than age wrapping its bony arms around her.
Marilyn. My name is Marilyn Mosher
, she’d say. But Ma kept talking like Art wasn’t even there.

“Jesus wept, Fancy,
he
wept for the little children, just like I’m weeping now. I’m only taking back my word, Fancy. I’m not
breaking
it, just taking it back. Grampie, he’d understand, surely he would, just as sure as you are the twelfth-born and that’s no baker’s dozen but a clear ringing twelve. You came into this world not even crying, just taking in a big gasp of air, and I knew. You can take things back from the dead in a way you can’t from the living. The dead forgive …” Her face twisted up, a face wanting to crawl off and bite. She rubbed my scar like she was trying to erase it. “The dead forgive, not like you … people. Praise be to the dead.”

No amount of powder could hide how thin her grey skin was. All at once I experienced the rush of Ma holding out her trembling hand with yellowed fingers, the cigarette, burned to the filter, falling on the step, Art’s hand on my back, the principal opening the door behind us, his voice a thick ribbon running along the bottom of Ma’s desperate words.

T
HE PRINCIPAL
came dashing out, the secretary right behind him. She took me and Art inside. Ma was screaming about my birthday and that they had no right to keep her from celebrating. We waited in the office for Loretta to come and get us. Me with my hands tight together and Art sitting close beside me, the heat off his brown skin soaking into my arm and thigh. Art knew better than to talk.

My eyes were closed and my thoughts were trapped birds, darting about as I tried to comprehend what had possessed my mother and made her crazy. The last time I’d seen her was in the early spring. Ma wanted me for supper and overnight. It seemed so promising, as everything does in that season when the whole world is bursting to life. Ma was off the gin for most of the year and she was embroidering and baking pies and cakes again. Ronnie told us Ma had been sober all winter when we bumped into him down in the valley at the grocery store, the week before Ma
showed up to plead for me. “Marilyn’s been dry as the dunes in the desert,” he said, all proud. Least we could do was be friendly to her. Her own damn daughter most of all, for a child owed her parent that much, Ronnie lectured, as Loretta and I stood in the baking needs aisle.

Ronnie was a long-haul trucker who brought up flowers from way down south where the palm trees grow for stores to sell here. He showered Ma with bouquets until the moment she died. Ronnie had loved her for years from afar, but Ma only let him move in after the car accident when they took me away and she had no toleration for solitude. Normally Ronnie couldn’t stand the sight of me but sometimes I’d catch him staring, for he was seeing glimpses of my Ma when she was young and tender. Ronnie called her his saltwater rose. What others saw as reckless he saw as courageous. He was the only one who could get Ma to take a break from drinking and call out the best in her, get those hands steady enough so she could make her pies and pickles and do embroidery, the things she treasured until the end. Ronnie was her knight in shining armour arriving in a white transport truck full of flowers. But of course Ma’s dry spells were like summer—glorious with promises of forever until one day the sky turns chill dark blue, the air turns cold and deceitful leaves spiral down, dried-up promises turning to dust.

Ma came over to Petal’s End to invite me herself. She was extra polite and minded her manners. She left her beater of a car grumbling in the driveway. Maybe she thought we would not open to her knock. But Loretta opened the door and stood listening. Ronnie would be the chaperone, if only Loretta would be kind enough to let me come for the night, Ma said as she stood eagerly at the doorway. “Loretta, of all people, you should understand.” Ma’s voice was breaking.

It wasn’t that Loretta liked Ronnie, only that she didn’t dislike anyone.
There’s the Lord in all people
, she’d say. We believed her and
Ronnie when they said she had been off the gin all year. Loretta believed in forgiveness—hate the sin but not the sinner, she preached. It had been heavy on her mind that it wasn’t right for her to keep a child from her mother. Loretta had a deep look of pity. Ma was so calm and contrite that Loretta was off her guard—she relented.

Loretta’s voice reached into my thoughts and brought me back from the spring to the principal’s office. “Girly Miss, I tell you, it’s never a dull moment. And Mister Man, what would we do without you looking after our Fancy?”

I opened my eyes. Loretta was beside me. I hadn’t even heard her come in the office. She took my hands and looked at my scar. “Oh my glory! We’ll put some ice on that,” she said. “Don’t you worry, not even for a minute.”

“I don’t need no looking after,” I said.

“Well, Girly Miss, you’ll just have to put up with it, isn’t that right, Art?” She squeezed my hand and I stood up. I was almost as tall as her that summer. I had no idea if she knew what Ma had said or what the principal had told her. But if anyone knew what Ma was ranting about, it was Loretta. She was avoiding my eyes. “You and Art get out to the car. Hector’s there.”

Ronnie’s truck was in the parking lot beside a police car. I looked around, worried Ma would leap off the roof screaming, wrapping herself around my neck, telling me to talk to the dead. There was no sign of her. I was glad Ronnie wasn’t around either. He blamed me, as though it were all my fault. But you don’t ask to be born.

Hector was leaning against a car near Ronnie’s, watching the grade nine class go by. He was examining the girls in their bright summer clothes. They were all giggling. Hector was dazzling to look at. There was not a woman who didn’t feel some sort of swoon for him. Loretta had made him the hired man earlier that year. He lounged on that fine long shiny car like he was the only
owner it had ever had, but in fact it was the Parkers’ car. Old Rolly, he called it. It had been the Colonel’s car and was sitting in the carriage house for years, but Marigold got Hector working on it. Or, rather, he got her to let him work on it, when Marigold decided she was well enough to come for the summer. It did not occur to Hector that no one with an expensive antique car like that would be in greasy work clothes and a ball cap.