The tide is low. I stumble on the rocks, but Mother doesn’t say anything, just stops and waits. Across the muddy flats is Little Island, an acre-wide wilderness of birches and dry grass. She points to it. “We’re going there. But we can’t stay long, or the tide will strand us.” Our path is an obstacle course of seaweed-slick stones. I pick my way along slowly, and even so I trip and fall, scraping my hand on a cluster of barnacles. My feet are damp inside my shoes. Mother glances back at me. “Get up. We’re nearly there.” When we reach the island, she spreads a wool blanket on the beach where it’s dry. Out of her rucksack she takes an egg sandwich on thick-sliced bread, a cucumber, two pieces of fried apple cake. She hands me half the sandwich. “Close your eyes and feel the sun,” she says, and I do, leaning back on my elbows, chin toward sky. Eyelids warm and yellow. Trees rustling behind us like starch-stiff skirts. Briny air. “Why would you want to be anywhere else?”
After we eat, we collect shells—pale green anemone puffs and iridescent purple mussels. “Look,” Mother says, pointing at a crab emerging from a tide pool, picking its way across the rocks. “All of life is here, in this place.” In her own way, she is always trying to teach me something.
TO LIVE ON a farm is to wage an ongoing war with the elements, Mother says. We have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay. Farmers work in the soil with mules and cows and pigs, and the house must be a sanctuary. If it isn’t, we are no better than the animals.
Mother is in constant motion—sweeping, mopping, scouring, baking, wiping, washing, hanging out sheets. She makes bread in the morning using yeast from the hop vine behind the shed. There’s always a pot of porridge on the back of the range by the time I come downstairs, with a filmy skin on top that I poke through and feed to the cat when she isn’t looking. Sometimes dry oatcakes and boiled eggs. Baby Sam sleeps in a cradle in the corner. When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What’s left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew.
Mother sings while she works. Her favorite song, “Red Wing,” is about an Indian maiden pining for a brave who’s gone to battle, growing more despondent as time passes. Tragically, her true love is killed:
Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing
The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying,
For afar ’neath his star her brave is sleeping,
While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.
It’s hard for me to understand why Mother likes such a sad song. Mrs. Crowley, my teacher at the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, says that the Greeks believed witnessing pain in art makes you feel better about your own life. But when I mention this to Mother, she shrugs. “I just like the melody. It makes the housework go faster.”
As soon as I’m tall enough to reach the dining room table, my job is to set it. Mother teaches me how with the heavy silverplate cutlery:
“Fork on the left. L-E-F-T. Four letters, same as ‘fork.’ F-O-R-K,” she says as she shows me, setting the fork beside the plate in its proper place. “Knife and spoon on the right. Five letters. R-I-G-H-T, same as ‘knife’ and ‘spoon.’ K-N-I-F-E.”
“S-P-O-O-N,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And glass. G-L-A-S-S. Right?”
“What a clever one!” Mamey calls from the kitchen.
By the time I’m seven I can strip thin ribbons of skin from potatoes with a knife, scrub the pine floors with bleach on my hands and knees, tend the hop vine behind the shed, culling yeast to make bread. Mother shows me how to sew and mend, and though my unruly fingers make it hard to thread a needle, I’m determined. I try again and again, pricking my forefinger, fraying the tip of the thread. “I’ve never seen such determination,” Mamey exclaims, but Mother doesn’t say a word until I’ve succeeded in threading it. Then she says, “Christina, you are nothing if not tenacious.”
MAMEY DOESN’T SHARE Mother’s fear of dirt. What’s the worst that can happen if dust collects in the corners or we leave dishes in the sink? Her favorite things are timeworn: the old Glenwood range, the rocking chair by the window with the fraying cane seat, the handsaw with a broken handle in a corner of the kitchen. Each one of them, she says, with its own story to tell.
Mamey runs her fingers along the shells on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room like an archaeologist uncovering a ruin that springs to life with all the knowledge she holds about it. The shells she discovered in her son Alvaro’s sea chest have pride of place here, alongside her black travel-battered bible. Pastel-colored shells of all shapes and sizes line the edges of the floor and the window ledges. Shell-encrusted vases, statues, tintypes, valentines, book covers; miniature views of the family homestead on scallop shells, painted by a long-ago relative; even a shell-framed engraving of President Lincoln.
She hands me her prized shell, the one she found near a coral reef on a beach in Madagascar. It’s surprisingly heavy, about eight inches long, silky smooth, with a rust-and-white zebra stripe on top that melts into a creamy white bottom. “It’s called a chambered nautilus,” she says. “‘Nautilus’ is Greek for ‘sailor.’” She tells me about a poem in which a man finds a broken shell like this one on the shore. Noticing the spiral chambers enlarging in size, he imagines the mollusk inside getting larger and larger, outgrowing one space and moving on to the next.
“‘Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul / As the swift seasons roll!’” Mamey recites, spreading her hands in the air. “’Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.’ It’s about human nature, you see. You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Well, then you’ll have to find a larger shell to live in.”
I consider this for a moment. “What if it’s too small but you still want to live there?”
She sighs. “Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you’ll either have to be brave and find a new home or you’ll have to live inside a broken shell.”
Mamey shows me how to decorate book covers and vases with tiny shells, overlapping them so they cascade down in a precise flat line. As we glue the shells she reminisces about my grandfather’s bravery and adventurousness, how he outsmarted pirates and survived tidal waves and shipwrecks. She tells me again about the flag she made out of strips of cloth when all hope was lost, and the miraculous sight of that faraway freighter that came to their rescue.
“Don’t fill the girl’s head with those tall tales,” Mother scolds, overhearing us from the pantry.
“They’re not tall tales, they’re real life. You know, you were there.”
Mother comes to the door. “You make it all sound grand, when you know it was miserable most of the time.”
“It was grand,” Mamey says. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.”
When Mother leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Mamey sighs. She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her. She says Mother would’ve been a spinster if Papa hadn’t walked up the hill and given her an alternative.
I know some of the story. That my mother was the only surviving child and that she clung close to home. After my grandfather retired from the sea, he and Mamey decided to turn their house into a summertime inn for the income, the distraction from grief. They added a third floor with dormers, creating four more bedrooms in the now sixteen-room house, and placed