I doubted this. I doubted that she was asked to come. She came, and cooked what she liked and rearranged things to suit herself, complaining about draughts, and let her power loose in the house. If she had never come my mother would never have taken to her bed.
My mother’s bed was set up in the dining room, to spare Mary McQuade climbing the stairs. My mother’s hair was done in two little thin dark braids, her cheeks were sallow, her neck warm and smelling of raisins as it always did, but the rest of her under the covers had changed into some large, fragile and mysterious object, difficult to move. She spoke of herself gloomily in the third person, saying, “Be careful, don’t hurt Mother, don’t sit on Mother’s legs.” Every time she said Mother I felt chilled, and a kind of wretchedness and shame spread through me as it did at the name of Jesus. This Mother that my own real, warm-necked, irascible and comforting human mother set up between us was an everlastingly wounded phantom, sorrowing like Him over all the wickedness I did not yet know I would commit.
My mother crocheted squares for an afghan, in all shades of purple. They fell among the bedclothes and she did not care. Once they were finished she forgot about them. She had forgotten all her stories which were about Princes in the Tower and a queen getting her head chopped off while a little dog was hiding under her dress and another queen sucking poison out of her husband’s wound; and also about her own childhood, a time as legendary to me as any other. Given over to Mary’s care she whimpered childishly, “Mary, I’m dying for you to rub my back.” “Mary, could you make me a cup of tea? I feel if I drink any more tea I’m going to bob up to the ceiling, just like a big balloon, but you know it’s all I want.” Mary laughed shortly. “You,” she said, “You’re not going to bob up anywhere. Take a derrick to move you. Come on now, raise up, you’ll be worse before you’re better!” She shooed me off the bed and began to pull the sheets about with not very gentle jerks. “You been tiring your Momma out? What do you want to bother your Momma for on this nice a day?” “I think she’s lonesome,” my mother said, a weak and insincere defence. “She can be lonesome in the yard just as well as here,” said Mary, with her grand, vague, menacing air. “You put your things on, out you go!”
My father, too, had altered since her coming. When he came in for his meals she was always waiting for him, some joke swelling her up like a bullfrog, making her ferocious-looking and red in the face. She put uncooked white beans in his soup, hard as pebbles, and waited to see if good manners would make him eat them. She stuck something to the bottom of his water glass to look like a fly. She gave him a fork with a prong missing, pretending it was by accident. He threw it at her, and missed, but startled me considerably. My mother and father, eating supper, talked quietly and seriously. But in my father’s family even grownups played tricks with rubber worms and beetles, fat aunts were always invited to sit on little rickety chairs and uncles broke wind in public and said, “Whoa, hold on there!” proud of themselves as if they had whistled a complicated tune. Nobody could ask your age without a rigmarole of teasing. So with Mary McQuade my father returned to family ways, just as he went back to eating heaps of fried potatoes and side meat and thick, floury pies, and drinking tea black and strong as medicine out of a tin pot, saying gratefully, “Mary, you know what it is a man ought to eat!” He followed that up with, “Don’t you think it’s time you got a man of your own to feed?” which earned him, not a fork thrown, but the dishrag.
His teasing of Mary was always about husbands. “I thought up one for you this morning!” he would say. “Now Mary I’m not fooling you, you give this some consideration.” Her laughter would come out first in little angry puffs and explosions through her shut lips, while her face grew redder than you would have thought possible and her body twitched and rumbled threateningly in its chair. There was no doubt she enjoyed all this, all these preposterous imagined matings, though my mother would certainly have said it was cruel, cruel and indecent, to tease an old maid about men. In my father’s family of course it was what she was always teased about, what else was there? And the heavier and coarser and more impossible she became, the more she would be teased. A bad thing in that family was to have them say you were sensitive, as they did of my mother. All the aunts and cousins and uncles had grown tremendously hardened to any sort of personal cruelty, reckless, even proud, it seemed, of a failure or deformity that could make for general laughter.
At supper-time it was dark in the house, in spite of the lengthening days. We did not yet have electricity. It came in soon afterwards, maybe the next summer. But at present there was a lamp on the table. In its light my father and Mary McQuade threw gigantic shadows, whose heads wagged clumsily with their talk and laughing. I watched the shadows instead of the people. They said, “What are you dreaming about?” but I was not dreaming, I was trying to understand the danger, to read the signs of invasion.
My father said, “Do you want to come with me and look at the traps?” He had a trapline for muskrats along the river. When he was younger he used to spend days, nights, weeks in the bush, following creeks all up and down Wawanash County, and he trapped not only muskrat then but red fox, wild mink, marten, all animals whose coats are prime in the fall. Muskrat is the only thing you can trap in the spring. Now that he was married and settled down to farming he just kept the one line, and that for only a few years. This may have been the last year he had it.
We went across a field that had been plowed the previous fall. There was a little snow lying in the furrows but it was not real snow, it was a thin crust like frosted glass that I could shatter with my heels. The field went downhill slowly, down to the river flats. The fence was down in some places from the weight of the snow, we could step over it.
My father’s boots went ahead. His boots were to me as unique and familiar, as much an index to himself as his face was. When he had taken them off they stood in a corner of the kitchen, giving off a complicated smell of manure, machine oil, caked black mud, and the ripe and disintegrating material that lined their soles. They were a part of himself, temporarily discarded, waiting. They had an expression that was dogged and uncompromising, even brutal, and I thought of that as part of my father’s look, the counterpart of his face, with its readiness for jokes and courtesies. Nor did that brutality surprise me; my father came back to us always, to my mother and me, from places where our judgment could not follow.
For instance, there was a muskrat in the trap. At first I saw it waving at the edge of the water, like something tropical, a dark fern. My father drew it up and the hairs ceased waving, clung together, the fern became a tail with the body of the rat attached to it, sleek and dripping. Its teeth were bared, its eyes wet on top, dead and dull beneath, glinted like washed pebbles. My father shook it and whirled it around, making a little rain of icy river water. “This is a good old rat,” he said. “This is a big old king rat. Look at his tail!” Then perhaps thinking that I was worried, or perhaps only wanting to show me the charm of simple, perfect mechanical devices, he lifted the trap out of the water and explained to me how it worked, dragging the rat’s head under at once and mercifully drowning him. I did not understand or care. I only wanted, but did not dare, to touch the stiff, soaked body, a fact of death.
My father baited the trap again using some pieces of yellow, winter-wrinkled apple. He put the rat’s body in a dark sack which he carried slung over his shoulder, like a pedlar in a picture. When he cut the apple I had seen the skinning knife, its slim bright blade.