Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [133]
“What are Fenians?” says Karen. The word makes her think of a laxative, she’s heard it on the radio. Feen-a-mints.
“Trash up from the States,” says the grandmother. “Irish. They wanted war. Their eyes were bigger than their stomachs though.” She talks about this event as though it just happened the other day, but really it was a long time ago. Over seventy years.
“We’re not Irish,” says Karen.
“Not by a long shot,” says Karen’s grandmother, “though your great-grandmother was.” She herself is Scotch, partly, so Karen is part Scotch too. Part Scotch, part English, part Mennonite, and part of whatever her father was. According to her grandmother, Scotch is the best thing to be.
The cemetery is weedy, though people still come here: some of the graves are mowed. Grandmother knows where everyone’s buried, and why: a car crash at a crossroads, four dead, they’d been drinking; a man who blew himself in two with his own shotgun, everyone knew only they didn’t want to say because then it would be suicide and that was a disgrace. A lady and her baby, the baby’s grave smaller, like a tiny bedstead; another disgrace, because that baby had no real father. But “All fathers are real,” says the grandmother, “though they’re not all right.” There are angel heads on the gravestones, urns with willow trees, stone lambs, stone flowers; real flowers too, wilting in jam jars. The grandmother’s mother and father are in here, and her two brothers. She takes Karen to look at them; she doesn’t say “their graves,” she says “them.” But mostly she wants to see Karen’s grandfather. His name is carved on his stone, and his two numbers – when he was born, and when he died.
“Maybe I should’ve sent him back to the Mennonites,” she says. “He might like to be with his own people. But most likely they wouldn’t’ve took him. Anyways, he’s best here with me.”
Grandmother’s own name is carved underneath his, but her right-hand date is a blank. “I had to get it fixed beforehand,” she says to Karen. “Nobody around here to do it, after. That Gloria and that Vi would probably just dump me into the ditch, save the money. They’re waiting for me to die so they can sell the farm. Or else they’d move me into that city, some hole in the ground. So I fooled them, I bought my own gravestone. I’m all set, come hell or high water.”
“I don’t want you to die,” says Karen. She doesn’t. Her grandmother is a safe place for her, although hard. Or because hard. Not shifting, not watery. She doesn’t change.
Her grandmother sticks out her chin. “I don’t intend to die,” she says. “Only the body dies.” She glares at Karen; she looks almost ferocious. Her hair on top is like thistles, after they’ve gone to seed.
Did Karen love her grandmother? thinks Charis, halfway to the Island, sitting at the back of the ferry, remembering herself remembering. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Love is too simple a word for such a mixture of harsh and soft colours, of pungent tastes and rasping edges. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” her grandmother would say, and Karen would flinch, because she could picture her grandmother actually skinning one. Her grandmother went out at dawn with her .22 rifle and shot woodchucks; also rabbits, which she made into stews. She killed the chickens when they were too old to lay or just when she wanted a chicken; she chopped their heads off with an axe, on the wooden chopping block, and they ran silently around the barnyard with their necks fountaining blood and the grey smoke of their life rising up from them and the rainbow of light around them fading and then going out. Then she plucked and gutted them and singed off their pinfeathers with a candle, and after they were cooked she saved their wishbones and dried them on the windowsill. She had five there already. Karen wanted them to break one, but her grandmother said, “Have you got a wish?” and Karen couldn’t think of one. “You save these for when you need them,” said her grandmother.
Karen asks more questions now; she does more things. Her grandmother says she is toughening up. When she goes to the