‘Can’t put nothing over on her,’ Mama said.
Helen smiled like Mama does when she sees a double rainbow after a thunderstorm.
The blizzard roared on all that day, only Daddy going out to feed the animals, milk the red Jersey cow, Primrose, and carry in more cut wood for the stove.
In daylight, even if the daylight was like dusk all day, I noticed quite a few things about Helen, though it wasn’t until after supper that I named her Helen. I guessed Helen was an adult like Mama and Daddy, though pretty young; I guessed eighteen, Daddy said twenty, and Mama was more inclined to sixteen, though she said she’d reserve judgment for a day or so.
Helen was about as tall as Mama, a height Daddy called big as a minute, a minute not being very big at all, only she was what Daddy called big-boned, so she looked a lot larger than Mama. Her hair was long and black as a crow’s wing, kind of wild and tangled, her skin was maple-colored and her cheek bones very high. Her eyes were so brown as to be almost black and were wide-spaced and deep-set.
The spots of frostbite on each cheek were angry looking, but she wouldn’t have no scars, Mama said, because of us putting the window frost on her cheeks the night before.
Mama and Daddy noticed something I hadn’t, something they wouldn’t have discussed with me, but since our living space had been constricted by the cold, and since I had a good ear for whispered conversations, I was able to pick up on it.
‘Dark as she is, that girl’s face is covered with bruises,’ Daddy said.
‘Poor thing. That’s probably why she was out,’ Mama replied. ‘She must have had to walk clear across Purgatory Lake to get here. It’s a wonder she didn’t freeze plumb to death.’
I decided right after breakfast that it would be my job to teach Helen, who I hadn’t yet named Helen, to speak English, but I couldn’t quite grasp that a person could not have any knowledge of English. I was trying to teach her whole sentences at once and not making any headway when Mama suggested a game, and I got out Snakes and Ladders. By sign language I taught Helen to count the spots on the dice and then she’d count off the same number on the board, and she’d smile and look proud when she landed on a ladder, and she’d giggle like a little girl and whoosh her button down when she landed on a snake.
I tried to get a name out of her. I would point at myself and say ‘Jamie,’ and I would point at Daddy and say ‘Johnny,’ and I would point at Mama and say ‘Olivia,’ and I would point at Helen and wait for her to say something, but the only sound we got from her were giggles when she landed her button on a snake.
Daddy said he figured she understood but just wasn’t ready to share her name with us yet. It was about that time I decided, as we were getting to the end of her first day with us, that she should be named Helen. She was partly named for The Romance of Helen Trent, the soap opera that asked the question, Can a woman over forty still find romance? and she was partly named for one of my toys, a curly-haired little black animal that I had received from Mama’s sister, my Aunt Mary Kaye, the Christmas before, and had already named Helen, for I considered Helen a very exciting name. The toy had deep-set brown eyes and black hair, as dark as Helen’s but not as crow-wing shiny.
‘We ought to call her Helen,’ I said, and not hearing any objections, I went through the naming and pointing again, pointing at myself and saying ‘Jamie,’ pointing at Daddy and saying ‘Johnny,’ pointing at Mama and saying ‘Olivia,’ pointing at her and saying ‘Helen.’ Helen smiled and giggled just like she’d landed her button on a snake. Still she never spoke a word.
The next few days were some of the happiest of my life, and I bet they were some of the happiest days of Helen’s life, too. I was ravenous for a friend, and Helen was willing to be just about whatever I wanted her to be.
Helen, I guess, was surprised about a lot of things at our big old house at the end of Nine Pin Road, which wasn’t much of a road at all, especially in the winter, but I guess the thing Helen was most surprised at was that we had a pig living in the kitchen.
We didn’t, Mama pointed out that first evening, as she was building roast pork sandwiches for Helen, have a pig living in our kitchen as a rule, unlike some we knew. Helen didn’t pay much attention to Mama, but she did laugh the first time Abigail Uppington came tick-tacking across the cold green linoleum from her box under the stove.
Abigail Uppington only weighed about two pounds, and was the runt of a litter that had appeared way too early in the year, having something, Mama said, to do with Daddy’s carelessness about keeping the boar and the sows separated. I bet Abigail Uppington didn’t weigh half a pound when Daddy brought her in, wrapped in a gunny sack. Mama fixed one of my leftover baby bottles, the rubber nipple stiff and kind of decaying, and fed Abigail Uppington, who at first, like Helen, didn’t have a name. It was Daddy who named her, after she’d recovered, and she’d got strong enough to tick-tack across the cold green linoleum from her box.
‘She acts like she owns the place,’ Daddy said.
Abigail Uppington was a character on a radio show called Fibber McGee and Molly, a character who was kind of like the widow, Mrs Beatrice Ann Stevenson, the artsy-craftsy person of her town, Wistful Vista.
Helen and I played with Abigail Uppington, and Helen laughed and hugged the little pig, and Mama pointed out, even though Helen didn’t understand a word and couldn’t, as Mama said, say boo in English, that pigs were extremely clean animals, cleaner than dogs certainly, and possibly even cleaner than cats. One of Mama’s chief worries in life was that someone, anyone, would think she was a dirty housekeeper.
Mama even got out some doll clothes she’d saved from when she was a girl, and she took a minute out of her work while her and Helen tied a pink bonnet on Abigail Uppington, and when Daddy came in from tending the animals he thought Abigail Uppington in a pink doll’s bonnet was about the funniest thing he had ever seen, and he laughed his laugh which was really a guffaw and could never be mistaken for anything else.
I got out a jigsaw puzzle, which Mama and I both decided would transcend the language barrier. Helen caught on real quick and giggled every time she found a piece that fit, though the way she looked at me and the puzzle, which was of a group of dogs sitting about a table playing poker, the two English bulldogs cheating by passing cards to each other, I bet she wondered why we were doing what we were doing. Mama said she expected Helen spent most of her time just foraging for a livelihood and didn’t have time for putting pink bonnets on pigs or passing the time with jigsaw puzzles.
On the night Fibber McGee and Molly came on the radio, sponsored by Johnson’s Wax of Racine, Wisconsin, Daddy pointed to the radio when Abigail Uppington came to call on Fibber McGee, and said ‘Abigail Uppington,’ and then pointed at the pig Abigail Uppington who was on Mama’s lap drinking from my baby bottle.
I don’t think Helen understood, but she did like the radio and laughed whenever Daddy laughed, which was about two to one for every time me and Mama laughed.
When Fibber McGee and Molly was over Daddy told Helen the story of how Matilda Torgeson of the Venusberg Torgesons was named for a dead pig. Seemed that Anna Marie Torgeson, when she was about seven years old, had adopted a runt of the litter, just like Abigail Uppington, only Anna Marie Torgeson named her pig Matilda. The runt survived and prospered, but Anna Marie’s daddy, Gunnar Torgeson, was a practical man, and when it came time for Matilda to go to market, off she went, in spite of Anna Marie’s wailings and weepings. To ease her pain, Anna Marie’s mama promised that Anna Marie could name the next critter born on the farm Matilda.
‘Well,’ Daddy said, ‘the next critter born on the farm was Anna Marie’s little sister, so the new little sister got named Matilda, in honor of a dead pig.
‘It’s a good job Anna Marie didn’t name her pig Runty or Big Snout,’ Daddy said, and guffawed again.
Helen turned out