My Mother's Book

My mother held the Book. She held it against her belly the way she never held any of us. Both hands on it. Her thumb crushed against the edge so the pages wouldn't move. They'd made room for her on the front seat. They'd wedged rags so it wouldn't knock around in the turns. The Book traveled well. It traveled better than us.

Father's pickup was loaded. Crates, tools rolled in rags, bags of laundry tied shut. A sheet over everything. The vehicle sank on its axles. It drove slow. We were in the back. Piled in. Knees in ribs. Elbows in soft bellies. Nobody cried. We fit into each other like puppies in a cardboard box. Ten hours. Maybe twelve. The engine ran and nobody talked.

The landscape changed. Not all at once. Three houses. Not enough to call it a village. Shacks set in the dirt like things someone dropped and never picked up. Tin on the roofs. Paint coming off. A general store with a grey wood porch. A gas pump out front. Potato fields on each side. Black soil, greasy, turned over. And behind the fields more fields. And at the end the forest. Not a forest you walk through. A wall. Spruce trees packed tight, dark, straight.

The community was a mile off the road. We saw it between the trunks. A roof. A fence. A horse in a yard. No power lines. No engine. Wind in the maples and a hammer somewhere. One blow. Another. Another. The same force. The same gap.

They wore black. The men had long beards with no mustache, cut straight, and wide-brimmed hats that hid their eyes. Their hands were red. Thick. Open. The cold had carved them down to the meat. The work was inside them. In the skin. In the swollen joints. In the calluses hard as wood knots.

The women wore dark dresses that fell from the collar to the ankles and white bonnets that took the hair. All of it. Not a strand out. The bonnets didn't hide. They swallowed. The women moved slowly. Every gesture measured. Every tilt of the head decided in advance.

The children were dressed like the parents. Only smaller. They walked in a line along the fences. They didn't run.

My mother stepped down from the pickup. She looked at the place. The whole of it. The black buildings, the fences, the silence, the white bonnets in the distance, the squares of packed earth where nothing grew that hadn't been willed.

I saw her face. Her jaw let go. The corners of her mouth settled. Her eyes opened a fraction.

Before, she was the one who forbade music. Television. Birthdays. The neighbors laughed about her among themselves. A careful laugh. She was alone with her rule and around her the world went on. The cars. The radios. The colored clothes. The children who ran and laughed. Here the silence held. The order held. The white bonnets and the long dresses and the hands set on the knees and the children in a line. All of it held. She didn't even have to raise her voice.

No films. No music. No doctor. No color. No newspaper. No toys. No book that wasn't the Book.

Meals at set hours. The bowl. The spoon. The jug. The bread. Prayer before. Prayer after. Nobody stood before the father.

We rose before dawn. The little ones rubbed their eyes. Closed fists against eyelids. Crumpled faces. Bodies warm from sleep in the rough sheets. I dressed them. The youngest couldn't button. Their fingers were small and the cold stiffened them. I laced the shoes. I set the bonnets on the small heads one by one and tied the ribbons.

Then the maples.

The maples. It was the only thing the community sold. The syrup went out. The money came in. Nobody said the word money. The money came in anyway.

We cut into the trunks. A V-shaped notch, not too deep. We drove a metal spile into the wound. We hung a bucket underneath. And we waited. The sap ran drop by drop. Clear. Almost tasteless. A taste of wood and earth and something sweet very far behind. Forty liters of sap for one liter of syrup.

The sugar shack at the end of the sugarbush. Low. A wide chimney. The sap boiled for hours. From clear to amber. From amber to brown. The smell stayed. Sweet. Thick. It clung to the hair. To the hands. You carried it to bed. You carried it to prayer. The smell was the only soft thing in that place and after a while you hated it.

One day a man needed a shed. He said something to my father. My father looked at me. I went.

At sixteen I could read a wood. Not with the eyes. With the hands. The palm flat on the plank. Fingers spread. What the fingers felt was the grain. The direction of it. The way the fibers ran beneath the bark. The knots where the wood turned on itself like a closed fist. You felt that and you knew where it would hold and where it would break. The wood told you if you knew how to listen.

I built my first shed that winter. Not a nail crooked. Not an angle that wasn't square. The man came. He walked around it. He ran his hand over the planks. Palm flat. The way I ran my hand over the wood before cutting it. He crouched in front of a corner. He ran a finger over a knot. He nodded. He said nothing. He left. Here a nod was all you could hope for.

They found me polite. That's the word they used. A neighbor said it one day in front of my mother. He was standing in the yard hands in his pockets hat pushed back. He said you've got a courteous young man. My mother smiled. A thin smile that didn't show teeth and didn't reach the eyes. She said thank you. She said God guided us. She set her hand on my shoulder. Her hand weighed like a lid.

In the evening it was the verses. After the meal. After the dishes. After the bowls had been turned upside down on the shelf and the table had been wiped and everything was in its place. My mother sat in the chair by the stove. The Book open on her knees. The light cut her face in two.

The little ones lined up on the bench. Me standing against the wall. The planks at my back knew the shape of my back.

Her voice was set. A voice with no temperature. She read the verse. We listened. Then each in turn. You recited what she had read. Word for word. What mattered was that the words came out in the right order. That your mouth made the right sounds in the right order.

If you got it wrong she corrected you. Without raising her tone. Without her face changing by a millimeter. She took the verse from the beginning. You started again. If you got it wrong again she started again. The same voice. The same rhythm. Her patience could last all night because it had no bottom.

Ruth always stumbled on the same words. She was eight. She stumbled over the proper nouns. Jerusalem. Gethsemane. Golgotha. Words made for the mouths of grown men and they were put in the mouth of an eight-year-old girl whose tongue stumbled on the G of Golgotha. And Ruth's eyes rose toward my mother. My mother started again. The same voice. The same gaze.

When a child couldn't retain the verse after five tries he didn't eat the next morning. The bowl stayed on the shelf. The child got up and watched the others eat and didn't eat and nobody looked at him. The child went to work on an empty stomach. He carried water. Cut wood. Walked in the cold with an empty stomach and the words he hadn't retained the night before in his head. In the evening he recited again. If he got it right he ate. It's as simple as that.

Ruth failed three evenings in a row. A week in November. The verse was from Isaiah. Long. Dense. Ruth opened her mouth and the first words came out. The ones from the beginning. Then the passage turned and the syllables jammed and her voice shrank and she stopped. At the same spot each evening.

Three mornings in a row Ruth didn't eat. The first morning she looked at the others' bowls. A quick glance. Sideways. She lowered her eyes and went out. The third morning she stayed near the door. Her fingers moved. A small motion against her thigh. Fingers folding and unfolding as if her hands were looking for something to hold and finding nothing.

The fourth morning I got up before the others. A few minutes. Enough for the house to still be in the dark. Enough for my footsteps to blend with the wood creaking and the stove ticking. I took my bowl from the shelf. I poured the porridge. I ate half. Standing in the half-light. The bowl in one hand. The spoon in the other. I set the bowl in Ruth's place.

Ruth came down. She saw the bowl. She sat and she ate. Both hands around the bowl. Elbows pressed against her body. Head down. Eyes on the door. Me standing against the wall three steps from her. Eyes on the door.

And Ruth finished the bowl. She set it back on the table. She pushed it toward the center. Away from her place. She looked at me for a second. She stood. She went out. The morning went on.

It was a Tuesday. The sky was calm. No wind. The silence outside was a real silence, a silence where you heard nothing at all except the blood in your own ears.

My mother was reading Ezekiel. The rebellious sons. She didn't search for the passage. Her hand knew where it was. Her hand always knew where the passages on rebellion were. Her finger landed on the verse. The finger didn't tremble. My mother's finger never trembled.

Nathan was six. His legs hung from the bench. His feet didn't touch the floor. His hands were on his knees. Hands that still had dimples where the fingers meet the palm, hands made to hold a toy.

He said sin instead of wound.

My mother took the verse again. The same voice. The same rhythm. The same patience. Nathan started over. Sin instead of wound. His eyes filled. He looked at his feet. His feet hanging in the void above the floor.

My mother said the verse a third time. Nathan opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His mouth open in the lamplight. A small mouth open on nothing. My mother closed the Book. The sound cracked. A sharp blow in the silence. The sound of a hammer on a nail.

— He's six.

It came out. I didn't decide it.

She was looking at me. Her eyes didn't move. They waited. They were used to waiting.

— He's six. He can't even read. You make him spit out words he doesn't understand. And when he doesn't understand you take away his food.

— Sit down and ask God for forgiveness.

Forgiveness. The word was hard in her mouth like a stone rolled under the tongue for years.

Ruth had her hand on Nathan's knee. Her small hand on his small knee.

She stood. The Book in her hands. She raised it above her head. Not the way you lift an object. The way you lift a stone. Her arms didn't tremble. The tendons stood out under the skin of her neck. The lamp threw her shadow on the wall behind. My mother was five foot four and her shadow filled the room. And it was the shadow that had raised us.

— You know what happens to rebellious sons.

When my mother spoke like that you sat down. I chose to stay standing.

I saw the Book move between her hands.

— He's six. He's six and he's hungry and you watch and you call that God.

My mother said to bed. They went up. I stayed against the wall. She put out the lamp. I heard her steps then the door then nothing.

The next evening she didn't bring out the Book. The little ones were on the bench. Hands on knees. Backs straight. The chair was empty. My mother was standing by the sideboard, her hands in something that didn't need her hands. She didn't sit. The hour passed. The little ones waited. Their legs hung from the bench.

The next morning either. The next evening either. The Book stayed on the sideboard. Closed.

Nathan didn't follow me outside anymore. Before he used to follow me. Three steps, five steps, pretending to be going the same direction as me. Now he stayed in the yard. Near the door. Near Mama.

Esther didn't hold out her hair to me in the morning anymore. Before she would stand there with her hair undone waiting for me to braid it. Now she waited. Not for me. For anyone. Nobody came. She went out with her hair undone.

It lasted ten days. I made the fire. Carried the water. Fed the animals. Cut the wood. Nobody spoke to me except my father once about the well chain. Ten days. The house each day more foreign.

I'd been wearing shoes too small for two years. My feet had grown. The shoes hadn't. The toes were twisted. Folded over each other. The big toenail dug into the flesh of the toe beside it. The flesh swelled. Opened. It bled. Every step was a calculation. Heel first or the side. You made that calculation all day. Carrying the buckets. Walking in the snow. Standing at prayer.

My mother wouldn't buy new ones. The shoes still held. They had soles and laces and they closed on the foot. In the evening I took them off. The socks stuck. The fabric had fused to the wound during the day. A crust of cotton and dead skin. I pulled the socks off centimeter by centimeter. Underneath the toes. Swollen. The nails rimmed with pink. I washed the socks myself. In the bucket. The cold well water on the stained fabric. In the morning they were dry. Stiff. Clean. Clean enough for one more day. I laced up. The calculation started again. Heel or the side. Toes crushed or lifted. I looked at the pink water in the bucket and it was my blood in the bucket and the bucket was the same bucket as the maples' and the water turned pink the same way the sap clouded in the evaporators.

The syrup and the blood were the same thing.

The eleventh day Esther came to the shed. I'd been alone since dawn. I was planing ash. A hard wood that gives its shavings only one at a time. The wood hadn't excluded me. The wood had received orders from no one.

The canvas at the entrance moved. Esther came in. She stopped two steps from the workbench. She looked at the floor, the plane, the shavings curled on themselves. Her hair was undone. Ten days of undone hair. Tight knots, strands stuck with sweat and the bonnet. Nobody had tended to it. The child didn't know how to tend to it herself.

She stood there. The hair in a clump. She looked at the bucket near the workbench. The pink water. My socks. My feet. Her foot touched the bucket. Not a kick. The gesture of a kid pushing a pebble. The bucket tipped. The pink water spilled on the packed earth. The earth drank.

— What is it. — Water. — It's pink. — Yes.

She crouched. Her fingers touched the wet earth. She looked at them. She rubbed them against each other.

— Does it hurt? — You get used to it, I said.

Esther raised her head.

— Me too.

She turned the bucket over and sat on it. Back straight. Hands on her knees. Feet flat on the packed earth.

I set the plane on the workbench. Blade up. In its place. I stood behind her. I took the comb from the workbench. The wooden comb I used for ash fibers. I ran it through her hair. Slowly. Knot by knot.

Esther didn't move.

I took the strands between my fingers. I started to braid. The fingers knew. Three strands. Left over right. Right over left. Her nape was white. The small hairs at the bottom curled against the skin. When I pulled too hard on a knot her head moved a millimeter back. I eased off. Her head came back.

The silence of the shed was not the silence of the house.