The Freedom in American Songs

Copyright © Kathleen Winter, 2014

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

 

FIRST EDITION

 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

 

Winter, Kathleen, author

The freedom in American songs : stories / Kathleen Winter. --

First edition.

 

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-927428-73-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927428-74-0 (ebook)

 

I. Title.

 

PS8595.I618F74 2014 C813'.54 C2014-902921-7

C2014-902922-5

 

Edited by John Metcalf

Copy-edited by Allana Amlin

Typeset by Chris Andrechek

Cover designed by Kate Hargreaves

 

 

 

 

B
iblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my daughters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part One

The Marianne Stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Plume of White Smoke

 

 

Frost on the kitchen window
sparkled against the darkness. The Hallorans' porch light shone through crystal patterns. Marianne got up to put small junks in her stove. In her hands the birch sticks twined around each other like lovers' limbs. When she lifted the damper and threw the sticks in, they cried like live lobsters. How she loved her black stove with its deer and trees on its door.

This time last year, she'd lived between a manmade pond and Her Majesty's Penitentiary, in an apartment that reeked of methane—the window had looked out on a transformer tower and a procession of clouds like swans with dangling necks. If she didn't write something soon and sell it, she'd have to go back to town and work in some dismal office, and it would not matter at all whether any of the women in this harbour ate her berries or bread.

The time she took buns next door, Mrs. Halloran had run to the pantry with them, shoving her husband and stepson away like cats. She'd made no mention of the buns and Marianne wondered if she'd thrown them out. She'd once given Mary an apple pie and Mary sat looking out her window at the snowbirds eating rolled oats, not acknowledging Marianne's gift—lovely lattice pastry—except that she touched the pie now and then while commenting on the view: “What a critch that Vardy youngster has on him,” or, “I love to watch the rocks come up through the melting snow …” as if she were measuring phases of the moon.

The time Marianne brought Mary a jar of raspberries, Thomas sat slurping tea out of his saucer, the grizzles on his chin grey and shaggy like a January juniper.

“What's this?” he droned. He snuffled and opened the jar with fingers swollen and cut from mending nets. Raspberry juice dribbled onto the speckled Formica. The berries were scarce in January. “Hmph. Strawberries. No, raspberries. What'd you put them up in? Are they cooked?”

“No. Sugar and water.”

He dropped the lid and left the jar mute in its juice puddle. You had to “put them up” in sugar and water—at least she'd done that right—but then you were supposed to boil them until the mess turned dark and shiny. Tom had the stove shaking with heat. Marianne spied long johns, nightdresses and a grandchild's baby clothes hung on a banister to dry. The stovepipe glowed red like iron in a foundry; missing rivets revealed a white inferno.

Marianne's stove was not like that. She did have good, creamy splits for lighting it. One of the young fishermen, Ezekiel, came up with his axe and cleaved them for her. Ezekiel had taken her with his pony and sled into the woods to cut the birch and some dry softwood.

Her lover from town said the new wood was an improvement on the rotten wood that she'd found by herself on the forest floor and that had filled her house with smoke. He didn't know Ezekiel had taken her on his horse to cut it. The pony had waited patient on the path, winter sun suspended between his ears. Marianne hung her scarf on a fir bough. She hadn't a clue what to do with an axe. Ezekiel showed her where to stand.

“Put some swing in it,” he said. Ezekiel swung twice and the tree slowly cracked, then rustled, falling. She watched him scoop a mound of snow and wash his mouth out with it. After this he referred to her as “the little beaver.” Now, each time she held a piece of the birch, she felt the sun's power in her hand.

The day after he helped her bring in the wood, Ezekiel came over and started making splits. He cut slices even as bread, then divided each slice into creamy fingers, using the axe delicately.

“I never saw such beautiful splits.” Tom's splits and Mrs. Halloran's, too, were rough and uneven.

Ezekiel grew embarrassed. “It's all according to what kind of wood you makes it out of.”

“I thought everyone had the same kind of wood.”

“You wouldn't make splits out of a junk that was full of knots.” From the pile he took a smooth junk. “You want one like this.” He touched a knotty piece with the axe, “Not that.” He'd stacked all her wood neatly: she'd left it in the pile where it had tumbled from the sawhorse. Then he taught her to make shavings.

He'd seen her prepare to make the shavings with an ordinary knife, and had cried out, “Come on, boy, invest in a hunting knife for making your shavings. You can't do it with that.” Then, when he saw her hold the stick and slide the knife toward herself, “Don't get a hunting knife then if you're going to use it like that!”

“Trust me to do a thing the queer way,” she said. In the cove, people still used the word in its old sense.

“Will this do?” She took up her breadknife. With a rag wrapped around its handle it made decent shavings. She made them as he'd shown her, thumb under the handle and tucked under her fingers, and long, clean strokes away from her. The shavings curled long and white, and when you made seven or eight on both sides of a stick, then the split looked lovely, tendrils arching off it like a Japanese lantern.

Now she laid her splits in a springy pile on the carved kitchen chair. They were so beautiful, and she had extra ones now, she considered taking a load to old Mrs. Ruby in the morning. How she'd met Mrs. Ruby was that Mrs. Ruby had dashed out of her house—once the old shop and post office—a pair of scissors in one hand, yelling, “I need a bit of that dress for one of my mats. Come in for a cup of tea while I cut a strip off it.” Her kitchen was full of bright rags and yarn, a hooked mat half-finished on its frame. When Marianne finished that first cup of tea, Mrs. Ruby pretended a ball-end of green yarn was a teabag, tossed it in Marianne's cup, made as if to pour the kettle over it and said, “Have another cup before you go.”

Now Marianne looked out at the sky. Moon-edged clouds tilted and collided over the swaying trees—the whole outdoors slid and crashed and moved. She had to go out in it.

Trees and wind, the wind heavy and wet through the spaces with a swoosh: snow had melted, revealing corn-coloured grasses down by the church. She started the graveyard way but the grasses drew her. She knelt and stroked them. The moon reflected in melting ice-puddles among the straw, nearly full.

A pointed boulder loomed high near the house no one lived in. When a car passed, the apple tree's branches extended in shadow over the clapboard. Above, the great bear glittered in his slow career. Below and all around, the dark spruce hid in their thicknesses deep mysteries. The islands called to each other with omnipresent gonglike voices. She knew the something she was looking for was happening. It was this. It was this night. She took the roadway home, over the hilltop that was always deserted, under a reeling sky; fences undulating overhill and dark twin spruce in the downhill sea-meadow.

One of Mrs. Halloran's cats crouched on the pine plank under the lilac tree in Marianne's yard. It liked to sharpen its claws on the bark. Mrs. Halloran never turned her porch light out until all her cats were called home. Two sat inside now on a sill—Marianne watched them from her bedroom window, silhouetted between Mrs. Halloran's orange curtains and the glass.
Lucky cats
, Marianne thought.
Nobody expects you to say anything
. A cat could roam the harbour intoxicated by lilac trees, grasses, phosphorescent lights in the sea, and not have to explain itself or make sense to any neighbours. She undressed, slid into the cold bed, and turned over and over until she found the exact position in which she always fell asleep.

 

*

 

The morning came brisk, all mildness of the day before gone. She lit her fire for the first time with the new splits Ezekiel had cut for her, then put the shavings for Mrs. Ruby in a Foodland bag. They jutted out of the top so she slid another bag upside down over them so everybody in the harbour would not see she was going down the road with an armload of shavings.

From Aspel Harbour to Spur Cove took twenty minutes to walk. When you passed the Silvers' house with the garden full of plum trees and reached the hilltop, you were out of Aspel Harbour: you saw Spur Cove and farther away the white church of Fox Cove. The only person who lived on the hill was the hermit. Marianne looked up at his house to see if there was any sign he was as crazy as people hinted: his curtains were drawn. She shouldn't have stopped: his door opened and he came out, waved.

“You're the girl from town … you're in the Devlins' old place.”

“Yes …”

“The writer.”

“Well … I'm trying to …”

“Marion.” He said it the Irish way. “Come up, girl, I want a word with you.”

He sat her at his table, which he'd set for his own tea. He gave her a small plate, a cup and saucer. On the plastic cloth he laid a clean cup towel, and on that a plate of jam-jams and slices of bread and margarine. He urged her to eat but did not eat anything himself. A pack of Rothmans lay beside his cup. Through his muslin curtains filtered sunlight in a waxy glow: it highlighted the puff of skin that stood out under his right eye like a cluster of miniature grapes, and rimmed the eye itself in a thin line of silver. Marianne was dying to pee.

“I have no toilet. There's a bucket.” He led her to a closet where a pail stood. The roll of toilet paper stood on a kerosene drum. A fragment of a pair of men's thermal underpants hung on the rafters, stretched out over nails. She squatted over the pail.

When she returned he began a long story about the ancestry of his two dogs. A beam from the southwest window shone through the shell of his ear and illumined it bright red. He poured tea from a dipper on a two-burner hotplate.

“My rangette has two burners like that,” she said. “But it has a small oven too. I like baking bread.”

“I bake a scattered few loaves.” It hadn't occurred to her that he could bake in his woodstove in the adjacent room. “Oh yes, don't be surprised. Last year I had thirteen Christmas cakes in here.” The unlikely cakes popped into her view like magic, superimposed over the jam-jams, his daybed with its mustard coloured mandala-covered coverlet, the little shelf in the corner behind his television, the blue and golden flowered linoleum …

“Iced,” he said.

“With marzipan?”

“No, not the yellow. White, I use. What you call hard icing. Thirteen cakes I had in here. And do you know I never sold one?”

“You had them for sale?”

“It cost me eighteen dollars to make each one, and I was charging twenty. For my time, you know. I sat by the woodstove and watched them so they wouldn't burn. And no one would look at them.” He sat up, hands clasped on the table, his hairline straight as a doll's, his nose wide and soft, the grape cluster standing out beneath his runny eye with its liquid, gleaming rim. What had been wrong with the cakes? Marianne's view of them changed. The cakes looked decrepit now. They began to match more closely the mood of their environment. Some of the cherries were falling out. If you looked closely you saw in the cakes pieces of things that should not have been there; potato peel, sawdust, a carrot top.

“Where did you learn how to bake?”

“By gorr, now that's a hard thing to say. I learned a bit of cooking home with my sisters, but it wasn't until I was a cook on the boats that I really learned.”

“The boats?”

“I worked on a boat taking fish to Brazil. On the way home we stopped to take on rum in Trinidad and the ship's cook disappeared. The crew drew matches out of the first engineer's hat. I drew the broken one. When we reached home I left that ship and got a berth on another one and by gorr before that one got to Trinidad the cook died. So I took it on again and I was a cook for fifteen years.”

“You were destined to be a cook.”

“There was a man came in last year when I had the cakes here, and by gorr he had only three months to live. And he was living on baby food, you know, that's all he could eat. You know the baby food out of jars.”

“Mashed carrots …”

“You eat it with a spoon.”

“Puréed peas …”

“And the like, yes, and when he came in here he said Ralph, I've got three months left to live and I've come for a slice,” he said, “just a slice, mind, of your Christmas cake. So I gave him a cake and he went home and he wrapped it and put it under the tree, and on Christmas morning when the kids had unwrapped all their presents he unwrapped the Christmas cake, his wife told me later, Bertha, and he cut himself a slice this big …” He intersected his forefinger with another finger, “and he put it in his mouth. Well, he kept it in his mouth and he chewed it for an hour, and then he swallowed it. And he said that's it now, that's that, and I'm glad to get that, and he never said another word about cake.”

Ralph lit a cigarette, went into a bedroom and came out with a framed photograph: his niece, her husband and little girl Josie, grown up now in medical school in Toronto. Marianne could not see their faces until she'd rubbed the grime off the glass.

“You never married?” she said.

“Not yet,” he looked at her meaningfully, took the photograph back to its place and sat in his chair.

She reached for her scarf.

“That curtain,” he pointed, “do you know why I put that there?”

“So people on the road can't see in?”

“There was a young girl used to come here once. To clean up. Then someone told her mother she was always over here. And I never saw her again. You understand.”

“People interfere.” Marianne had her coat on by now. She stood, and he got up beside her. She reached for the door.

“I've locked that door so no one can come in.”

The hook had been fitted into its eye. She lifted it out. As she did so, he put his face against hers and gave her a gentle hug. His grizzles prickled her cheek.

“Next time you pass by come in and see me again. I'm always here.” He said this last sentence looking her straight in the eye, his hand on her arm.