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Zack never married. He remained highly visible within the family, passionately
unmarried, but he always had a girl friend, a new one. Never seemed able to make up his mind
whether he loved women, or hated them.

We sisters were wary of him. If one of us admitted she'd made a mistake about anything,
big or small, he'd sneer, "Just like a woman." In private, he would borrow money that he seldom
repaid. We stopped loaning him money after a while, which, of course, made him mad at us. He
was our brother, so we loved him, but we didn't trust him.

The other brother, my Great Uncle Willie, married young but only had two children, the
New York cousins, before he was killed in a logging accident in 1925. His wife sold their small
farm, took the girls to the big city and made a small splash of brilliant spangles in what the
family snidely described as "The Theater."

Two of Aunt Sophie's sisters, Lucy and Lydia, were twins. Each married boys they
knew from town and produced three children, whom they neglected and smothered in spurts,
depending on whether they were drinking heavily or rediscovering religion. They did both
frequently. The third sister, Herminie, married late, being nearly twenty-seven. For a while it had
been feared she would be another poor spinster like Sophie. But she married a good man and had
one child, the only real criminal the family ever produced. The boy was attracted to what he
considered stagnant money in banks. He'd been unable, after stealing it, to resist setting fire to
the building, using the President's desk as a base, and wills, mortgages and the like for tinder. He
wasn't brought up much in family discussions.

The pride of the family though, for having kids, was my Grandmother Mandy, who
married at fifteen and in the next twenty-five years gave birth to eighteen children, one of whom
was my father. Only fourteen of them survived entry into the family, but these fourteen grew
from healthy and lusty kids into healthy, lusty and often hell-raising, adults. Naturally enough
these children of Mandy's, and the other married sisters and brother, produced even more
children. Aunt Sophie was never without resources.

As Mandy's older sister, Sophie's career started naturally enough with the birth of
Araminta, Mandy's first child. Mandy was barely sixteen and nervous about the whole affair. Her
husband Zed, my grandfather, ran the local bar. He spent the event in town. His customers
helped him celebrate the birth.

Aunt Sophie delivered the child and declared her to be, "Rather ugly but she has nice
hands and feet." Despite Mandy's protests she stayed to help with the canning and never returned
home.

By late 1918 Mandy had four children. Aunt Sophie had helped birth them all, including
number four, my father, Wilber.

For some reason no one knew but everyone gave thanks for, Mandy didn't have any
children for the next few years. Some cynics said that with the war over Zed didn't need to keep
producing dependents. Whatever the reason, it gave everyone a much needed rest, at least
temporarily.

Aunt Sophie stayed until Wilber was walking and then, with no new births on the
horizon, she went to Cannon Beach, where Willie and Zack were working on the roads. She kept
house for them for some months and "worked out" for a couple of years. That was the story the
family knew, and the one I'd grown up with. I never suspected, because I was, naturally more
interested in myself than in her life, that there was more to those years than I knew. Incredibly
more.

In that time she knew love.

"You know that Mandy had Zed, and the twins had Jack and Edward, and even Hermie
eventually got her Zorba." Sophie wasn't asking me. It was a statement of fact.

I nodded.

"Well, David was mine."

She took a deep breath, settling herself more firmly onto the ground. "He was mine, but
he belonged to someone else."

This is Sophie's story, hers and David's.

* * * *

The winter your father was learning to walk, I got a letter from Zack. He and Willie
were batching it in a small cabin at Cannon Beach. Zack wanted me to come down and keep
house for them. The ocean was beautiful in winter, he said, and they had a grand view from their
window. It would be a big help if I could just add a feminine touch to the place. He meant do all
their
womanly
work for them, of course.

It sounded romantic to me, and Mandy had been kinda testy lately. The winter supplies
were in and she could handle the kids and Zed by herself, now that she was all of twenty, so I
went.

When I got there it was the middle of November, but warm. The cabin was bigger than I
expected, with two small bedrooms. Willie and Zack shared one and I had the other one all to
myself. After all the years of sharing a bed with either a sister or one of Mandy's kids, it felt
good to have a whole bedroom all to myself, let alone my own bed. It was just a simple cot, with
a straw mattress. I wanted to make a quilt for it so Willie made me a frame to work on. While the
boys were at work, after I had my chores done, I'd get out my scrap bag, which goes everywhere
I do, and cut pieces.

The boys were glad to have me. They were only seventeen and sixteen that first winter.
Willie especially missed the motherly nagging, though you'd never have known it to hear them
talk. They loved being on their own and making their own pay. They blew half of their wages
every Saturday night at the dance hall saloon in Seaside.

Before I came they blew almost all of it. After a couple of bad weekends I made them
give me half of it before they went to town. They didn't like it but it was the only way I could
make sure we had food on the table and the rent got paid. After rent, food, savings for all three of
us, and a wage to me, the rest was theirs. I marked three envelopes, one for Willie, one for Zack,
and one for myself and put in three dollars a week in each of the envelopes. Zack never really
appreciated it, especially the money I kept as wages for myself, two dollars a week.

Naturally, he made the most work for me. Zack still thinks women were born to serve
him, which is why he never got a women to stay with him for long. Our natures were never very
sympathetic to each other. I fancied myself a suffragette and resented his attitude towards
me.

I have to admit this too, I liked my position as older sister. I made the most of the
opportunity to boss Zack around without Mom there to interfere. He fought me, but because he
had asked me to come, he had little ground to stand on. Not if he wanted dinner.

Willie was different. He was grateful for everything I did for him. Zack was a terrible
cook and housekeeper so Willie was delighted with the clean cabin and my apple pies, thick bean
soups and the chowders I learned to make.

The kitchen was mine. Not Mandy's or my mother's. Mine. I filled the windowsills with
shells from the things we caught and that we found. There was a mist of sand on the sills from
the wind through the cracks around the window frames. The stove worked best for me; the boys
could never get it right. And then I would show them how to build the right kind of fire. It
irritated them, which was of course why I did it. That was my most favorite kitchen, even more
than David's. The boys were more than glad to have me take over.

They taught me how and where to dig for the razor clams on the beach. And how to get
the blue-shelled mussels that we steamed and dipped in melted butter. Mmm, so good.

We got the mussels from the rocks and the tide pools at Haystack when the water was
just covering them. Most of the time I could twist them off the rocks; sometimes I had to use a
knife to cut them loose. Whenever the tide was right or I was tired of beans and smoked pork, I'd
take my shovel and knife down to the beach and get mussels and all kinds of clams. The smell of
salt in the air, the sun shining on my back, or the fog swirling around... I still miss it.

We went fishing in the surf when it wasn't too rough. We had fish fried, baked, and in
soup, until we were sick of it and glad to get back to bread and beans. Once in a while we took a
little boat and went crabbing. I don't know who the boat belonged to. It sat up above the beach
and we'd just put it back when we were done. Zack made a crab pot out of some wire and net he
got from a fisherman friend. It was a round thing that you throw in the water weighted with some
fishing lead. We'd tie some stinky fish to the net and throw it in the water from the boat, come
back about an hour or so later and pull it up. One of my jobs was to dip the bucket we brought
along into the ocean, leaning over the edge of the boat and scooping it about half full of
water.

Truth to tell, I loved going out over the waves onto the ocean. It was just scary enough
to be fun, but I trusted the boys to be able to get us out and back. Didn't do it often 'cause the
ocean was pretty rough most of the time.

Getting crabs was fun, like a surprise party every time we pulled that thing up. They'd be
scooting around in there trying to get out and Zack would just grab 'em and throw 'em in the
bucket. I was scared they'd grab me. They'd scritch and scratch around in there until we got 'em
home and put 'em out of their misery by throwing them in a pot of boiling water. Cooked in the
salt water I'd got from the ocean, with a bit of nutmeg, they weren't bad but I never was crazy
about them like the boys were. And David.

Willie shot a deer just before Thanksgiving, soon after I came. What we didn't eat fresh I
made into venison mincemeat, with raisins and pieces of apple with a good amount of vinegar to
tart it up. It made great pies. I canned a bunch of it up. Some Sundays I'd make a couple
mincemeat pies. Willie'd hang around to smell them cooking. But more, he did love it when I'd
give him a big slice. I'd watch him eat it, smacking his lips. I maybe enjoyed it more than he
did.

Both the boys were rough. That was the way with all the men in our family, I didn't
think much about it. Their manners were terrible. They belched at the table and never excused
themselves. Their hands were callused and unclean looking from the rough road work they did. I
made them wash for meals. They had to be reminded to comb their hair, except on Saturday
nights, and the only clothes they had were work clothes, the red plaid shirts and dark work
pants.

On Saturday night, Zack, in particular, had a regular ritual of cleaning up. He washed his
hands and face real good, changed his work socks for his nicer, dancing socks. Most of all, he
polished his shoes, his special dancing shoes, something the other guys--certainly not
Willie--didn't have. He'd get out his black polish and his special rag, and after cleaning off the stuff left
on his shoes from the week before, he whip those dancing shoes into shape--you know, polish
and spit, polish and spit. When he got done he'd put those shoes on and walk different. Careful
not to get in any mud. He carried a piece of cloth in his pocket to spiff them up just before he and
Willie went into the hall.

There was a dance hall over to Seaside where everybody went. The boys had an old
buggy that one of the guys from the road crew got from somebody. They'd all go over in that. I
didn't much like the road, as it was close to the cliffs in a couple places, rough cut and narrow.
They guys all had the same idea of a great time, going to the dance hall with plenty of liquor and
dancing with the wild girls they met there.

Sometime early in the morning one of the guys from Seaside would dance with one of
the girls that belonged to a guy from the road crew and she would laugh too much at his jokes.
The fight would be on. It was the same every Saturday night. Willing girls, too much whisky,
wild dancing, then the fight. The ride home was a sobering experience with the trees leaning in
close and who knows what out there in the dark. At least the horses only drank water so
everybody always made it home in one piece.

I know all this because I went with them. I liked the dancing, and yes, the drinking. The
men all had strong arms and spared no expense at showing a fun-loving gal a good time. They
were young and so was I. My hair was down to the middle of my back, and dark. Ebony-black
David called it. I was taller then, five feet seven. A couple of inches, maybe, have disappeared. I
was full-hipped, not just broad like now, and high breasted, and my waist was small so it
narrowed-in nicely. The men liked to grab me around the middle and twirl me around. Even
David liked to run his hands down my sides. "Measure the hourglass," he'd say.

I was never especially pretty, but I was what they called then, handsome. But David said
that when I laughed, I was beautiful.

David lived in the house above us. It wasn't a cabin. It was a real house that David and
his wife had designed and built themselves. They got wood from all sorts of places, some that
washed up on the beach, some lumber they bought from Seaside, and then David had cut down
trees up in the woods. The house was much longer than it was wide. It faced the ocean and was a
two-storied affair with what they called a cupola on top, right in the middle.

The cupola looked like a fancy chicken coop to me. It was glass all around, except for
the wooden frame. You could open up the window front and back to let the air blow through.
David loved to sit up there in the summer and paint. Painting was the way he made his living,
and it was his passion. When he tired of painting he would turn to his telescope and watch the
seals over by Ecola Bay.

The second floor was their bedroom. There was also a smaller bedroom, which was
meant to be a child's room, but, in their twelve years of marriage, no children had come. They
used it mostly for storing David's paintings.

The downstairs was one big, long room. The kitchen was at one end and a big stone
fireplace was at the other end. The fireplace had a double chimney that opened into their
bedroom, too.