Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [14]
These questions rush at her, depriving her of air. At the same time, overlapping like an eddy of fresh water, comes the thought of her darkened front room, the armchair with its cool felt seat cushion, the way the green tapestry cloth is worn away at one corner, and how careful she is always to keep that corner turned from view.
The old Jew hangs on to her, and with his other hand gestures wildly in the direction of Mercy Goodwill’s kitchen door. "Meesus sick," he manages, "sick, sick," and finally she understands.
The ground between the two houses is uneven, full of rocks and roots and tufted grass. They run together toward the open doorway, awkwardly, bumping up against each other, the old Jew’s fingers never once letting go of the woman’s wrist.
It is a temptation to rush to the bloodied bundle pushing out between my mother’s legs, and to place my hand on my own beating heart, my flattened head and infant arms amid the mess of glistening pulp. There lies my mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill, panting on the kitchen couch with its cheap, neat floral cover; she’s on her side, as though someone has toppled her over, her large soft trunky knees drawn up, and her woman’s parts exposed.
Like seashells or a kind of squashed fruit.
Her blood-smeared drawers lie where she’s thrown them, on the floor probably, just out of sight.
There’s nothing ugly about this scene, whatever you may think, nothing unnatural that is, so why am I unable to look at it calmly?
Because I long to bring symmetry to the various discordant elements, though I know before I begin that my efforts will seem a form of pleading. Blood and ignorance, what can be shaped from blood and ignorance?—and the pulsing, mindless, leaking jelly of my own just-hatched flesh, which I feel compelled to transform into something clean and whole with a line of scripture running beneath it or possibly a Latin motto.
And there is my father to consider, for here he comes now, walking home down the Quarry Road. He’s whistling, slapping at the sandflies, kicking up dust with his work boots. He is exhausted.
Who wouldn’t be exhausted after nine hours of hacking at the rock shelf, fourteen cents an hour, which is less than the cost of the pound of Vestizza currants his wife, Mercy, put in her Christmas pudding last winter? But he’s whistling some merry tune, "Little Cotton Dolly" or perhaps "Zizzy Zum, Zum." At Pike’s Road, which leads to the graveyard, he stops and empties his bladder.
The distance between Garson and Tyndall is two miles. The other quarry workers, after a day in the lime kilns or working with their picks at the stone face, ride home to Tyndall in the company wagons, their boots hanging over the side. Sturdy teams of horses—those beautiful, thick-muscled, ark-worthy beasts scarcely seen nowadays—pull them homeward. But not my father.
He prefers to walk. He’s an odd sort, that’s what’s said of him in these parts. A loner. Daft-looking. Goes his own way. A runt. A quick worker though, no flies on him. Smart with machinery. Has a touch. Quiet, sober, comes from Stonewall Township, himself and his wife too. As for his wife, well (this said with a wink, a poke of the elbow), there’s enough woman there to keep two or three fellows busy all the night long.
He likes to stretch his legs after a day spent bending over the limestone face or peering into the innards of the cantankerous old steam channeler. The quarry is only a few years old, discovered in 1896 by a farmer