cracks. Another thing I liked looking at was chimney stains, old or fresh, which I could turn into animals, people’s faces, even distant cities. I told my own two boys about that, and their father, Dan Casey, said, “See, your mom’s folks were so poor, they couldn’t afford TV, so they got these stains on the ceiling — your mom had to watch the stains on the ceiling!” He always liked to kid me about thinking poor was anything great.
WHEN MY FATHER was very old, I figured out that he didn’t mind people doing new sorts of things — for instance, my getting divorced — as much as he minded them having new sorts of reasons for doing them.
Thank God he never had to know about the commune.
“The Lord never intended,” he used to say. Sitting around with the other old men in the Home, in the long, dim porch behind the spirea bushes, he talked about how the Lord never intended for people to tear around the country on motorbikes and snowmobiles. And how the Lord never intended for nurses’ uniforms to be pants. The nurses didn’t mind at all. They called him “Handsome,” and told me he was a real old sweetheart, a real old religious gentleman. They marvelled at his thick black hair, which he kept until he died. They washed and combed it beautifully, wet-waved it with their fingers.
Sometimes, with all their care, he was a little unhappy. He wanted to go home. He worried about the cows, the fences, about who was getting up to light the fire. A few flashes of meanness — very few. Once, he gave me a sneaky, unfriendly look when I went in; he said, “I’m surprised you haven’t worn all the skin off your knees by now.”
I laughed. I said, “What doing? Scrubbing floors?”
“Praying!” he said, in a voice like spitting.
He didn’t know who he was talking to.
I DON’T REMEMBER my mother’s hair being anything but white. My mother went white in her twenties, and never saved any of her young hair, which had been brown. I used to try to get her to tell what color brown.
“Dark.”
“Like Brent, or like Dolly?” Those were two workhorses we had, a team.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t horsehair.”
“Was it like chocolate?”
“Something like.”
“Weren’t you sad when it went white?”
“No. I was glad.”
“Why?”
“I was glad that I wouldn’t have hair anymore that was the same color as my father’s.”
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
ALL THESE THINGS I remember. All the things I know, or have been told, about people I never even saw. I was named Euphemia, after my mother’s mother. A terrible name, such as nobody has nowadays. At home they called me Phemie, but when I started to work, I called myself Fame. My husband, Dan Casey, called me Fame. Then in the bar of the Shamrock Hotel, years later, after my divorce, when I was going out, a man said to me, “Fame, I’ve been meaning to ask you, just what is it you are famous for?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know, unless it’s for wasting my time talking to jerks like you.”
After that I thought of changing it altogether, to something like Joan, but unless I moved away from here, how could I do that?
IN THE SUMMER of 1947, when I was twelve, I helped my mother paper the downstairs bedroom, the spare room. My mother’s sister, Beryl, was coming to visit us. These two sisters hadn’t seen each other for years. Very soon after their mother died, their father married again. He went to live in Minneapolis, then in Seattle, with his new wife and his younger daughter, Beryl. My mother wouldn’t go with them. She stayed on in the town of Ramsay, where they had been living. She was boarded with a childless couple who had been neighbors. She and Beryl had met only once or twice since they were grown up. Beryl lived in California.
The paper had a design of cornflowers on a white ground. My mother had got it at a reduced price, because it was the end of a lot. This meant we had trouble matching the pattern, and behind the door we had to do some tricky fitting with scraps and strips. This was before the days of pre-pasted wallpaper. We had a trestle table set up in the front room, and we mixed the paste and swept it onto the back of the paper with wide brushes, watching for lumps. We worked with the windows up, screens fitted under them, the front door open, the screen door closed. The country we could see through the mesh of screens and the wavery old window glass was all hot and flowering — milkweed and wild carrot in the pastures, mustard rampaging in the clover, some fields creamy with the buckwheat people grew then. My mother sang. She sang a song she said her own mother used to sing when she and Beryl were little girls.
I was excited because Beryl was coming, a visitor, all the way from California. Also because I had gone to town in late June to write the Entrance Examinations, and was hoping to hear soon that I had passed with honors. Everybody who had finished Grade 8 in the country schools had to go into town to write those examinations. I loved that — the rustling sheets of foolscap, the important silence, the big stone high-school building, all the old initials carved in the desks, darkened with varnish. The first burst of summer outside, the green and yellow light, the townlike chestnut trees, and honeysuckle. And all it was was this same town, where I have lived now more than half my life. I wondered at it. And at myself, drawing maps with ease and solving problems, knowing quantities of answers. I thought I was so clever. But I wasn’t clever enough to understand the simplest thing. I didn’t even understand that examinations made no difference in my case. I wouldn’t be going to high school. How could I? That was before there were school buses; you had to board in town. My parents didn’t have the money. They operated on very little cash, as many farmers did then. The payments from the cheese factory were about all that came in regularly. And they didn’t think of my life going in that direction, the high-school direction. They thought that I would stay at home and help my mother, maybe hire out to help women in the neighborhood who were sick or having a baby. Until such time as I got married. That was what they were waiting to tell me when I got the results of the examinations.
You would think my mother might have a different idea, since she had been a schoolteacher herself. But she said God didn’t care. God isn’t interested in what kind of job or what kind of education anybody has, she told me. He doesn’t care two hoots about that, and it’s what He cares about that matters.
This was the first time I understood how God could become a real opponent, not just some kind of nuisance or large decoration.
MY MOTHER’S NAME as a child was Marietta. That continued to be her name, of course, but until Beryl came I never heard her called by it. My father always said Mother. I had a childish notion — I knew it was childish — that Mother suited my mother better than it did other mothers. Mother, not Mama. When I was away from her, I could not think what my mother’s face was like, and this frightened me. Sitting in school, just over a hill from home, I would try to picture my mother’s face. Sometimes I thought that if I couldn’t do it, that might mean my mother was dead. But I had a sense of her all the time, and would be reminded of her by the most unlikely things — an upright piano, or a tall white loaf of bread. That’s ridiculous, but true.
Marietta, in my mind, was separate, not swallowed up in my mother’s grown-up body. Marietta was still running around loose up in her town of Ramsay, on the Ottawa River. In that town, the streets were full of horses
