She had a white hair comb, a toothy thing made of bone. Often as she spoke she would withdraw it from her hair and lay it by on the bed stand. Or she’d let me hold it while I listened. On its spine ran loops of lacework and filigree, raised from the bone. My fingers traveled over that smoothness.
I believe those hours mother spent with me worked like elixirs for her, staving off her homesickness with Old World legend. She was a strong woman: ethically strong, strong in Christ, strong against circumstance. But even for all her strength, mother has etched herself in my memory as a figure of suffering.
I inherited from her the damnable headache, pain so fierce it set me to snapping thick twigs in my teeth. She bore frequent attacks all her adult life, but I didn’t become aware of them until about this time, between my seventh and eighth years. It’s strange and startling how life, in bits and pieces, enters the consciousness.
Every several weeks she became a stone. She slid back from the world, breathing hard and slow, blinking heavily, as though just her slumping eyelids were too much to endure. I was not to speak to her then, unless I chose to whisper to her from the Psalms—only the Psalms and only a whisper.
Even today when I’m wracked by this pain of mother’s blood I breathe to myself the Psalms: “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.” It brings comfort, though never relief.
Octogenarian that I am, I have cause to speak of anguish so various, so multifaceted, that younger souls would gape in wonder at the ingenuity of all those forces which descend upon one near the end of life. And yet it’s different pain, the pain of those I’ve loved in my time, which draws my focus now. This is the stuff that finally matters and sticks in the mind. The closer we move to the big door at the end of the hall, the more we siphon off our tiny personal excruciations for a share in all that which has made our time significant. The hard-won histories of our friends and relations—our undiminishing currency.
Whenever the pain turned mother white, father and I would creep about the house, careful of the puncheon floor trembling at our boots. We brought her hot compresses for her head, stepping gingerly. Sometimes if she seemed to sleep, father would lead me out into the night toward the lights of the Exchange Hotel.
“This pain mother bears,” he told me, “it’s the curse of her womb. Since she can’t know labor she knows another pain. Tis natural for her womanhead.”
He told me this often, and I heard it several times before I saw my own birth for the exceptional thing it was.
In the lobby of the Exchange I would sit at a table with my books while father fell in among the men at the bar. Amidst a fog of tobacco and streams of spilt liquor I studied Golding’s Ovid, deciphered the folly of Phaethon at his father’s business, the reins of the sun-chariot in his boyish hands:
The singed cloudes began to smoke amaine. The Medes and Pastures
greene
Did seare away: and with the leaves, the trees were burned cleene. The parched corne did yeelde wherewith to worke his owne decaie. Tushe, these are trifles. Mightie townes did perish that same daie. Whose countries with their folke were burnt: and forests ful of wood Were turnde to ashes with the rocks and mountains where they stood.
Father crossed the lobby sometimes and sat with his chums on the settle nearby. Joel Aitken was a haulier in the Mount Hope Slope. He looked too huge a man to work in a mine—he had arms like oak branches. He flung his massive legs onto a table and spat frequently into a spittoon on the floor. He uttered few substantive words while the men rumbled at one another, but often his guttural earthquake of a laugh would tremor through the ranks and he would throw a ton of palm against a nearby back and affably wag his head. He leaned over to me once and fixed me with bloodshot eyes. His love for father made me peculiarly precious to him I think. The two men had worked on a team together in the early days of the town.
“What do you study, boy?”
“Ovid, sir.”
“Ovid,” he said. The name rolled untamed over his tongue. “Ovid . . . Ovid, by Jove!” He grinned with yellow mouth and winked, one sackcloth eyelid falling heavily. “Learning your Latin tales are you? That’s well!”
His attention trailed back to the uproar of the men and he sat upright in their midst again, guffawing at something and slapping the tabletop hard.
I returned to my book. In a moment Joel’s voice was near me again and I raised my head to find him leaning once more.
“Have you met with Daphne yet?”
“Daphne and Apollo, yes!”
“No—Daphne,” he said, “hard-won woman I mean. Have you? No? Well, you shall, boy! You shall! More than one woman has turned to a tree at my chase! You shall!”
He clenched my shoulder mercilessly, then turned to spit.
One night before the blue of my knuckles had faded, I was with father at the Exchange Hotel when Boggs and Buxton swaggered in.
Buxton was a watchman. He had a jouncing, bowlegged walk, as though his feet burned him when they bore his weight. He talked in Welsh but was proudly of Irish birth, and he took to Boggs in a way that seemed insidious. Really, his mixed culture served him even less than an undiluted Irish bearing would have done, and he and Boggs were equally despised. For Boggs’s part, it needed a queer temerity for an Irishman to stand as a boss in a mainly Welsh town, let alone think to frequent the workingmen’s leisure places.
I watched the two men enter and walk to the bar. Father set down his tumbler and grew quiet amidst his noisy fellows. The tendons in his neck flexed stiff. He turned to me and studied me in silence a while, then slid toward me.
“Not a word now, Ash. Come.”
I rose and followed him across the wide wooden floor, then stood off a few feet as he shouldered up against the bar. He leaned close to the two Irishmen, talking and nudging Boggs with a wide-braced elbow. Some of his words drifted my way: “You’ll not bruise the boy again.”
Boggs glanced back at me. He shook his head and drank from his tumbler, father’s mouth moving in his ear.
More murmurs and the subdued gestures of shoulders and heads. Father said something to Mr. Gwynn, the hotel owner and bartender, and Mr. Gwynn looked dismayed, stooping to bring out his ledger book from beneath the bar. He glanced askance from father to Boggs to Buxton as he leafed through the pages. Then he entered something down in pencil. Father turned and I stepped out with him into the frosted night.
We crossed the tracks toward our house in silence. A white fog lurked in the hollow around us.
“It’s best to buy a man’s drink in a grievance, Ash,” said father at last. “Then if it comes to fists you know it’s needful.”
And as we came up to our house, he laid a hand on my back and turned to me. “Your mother would say different than what I’ve told you. That’s well enough. You’ll decide your own way. But you mustn’t tell her what I’ve done. She’ll not bear it well.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He grinned. “You’re growing up.”
{5}
THE LONG DAYS IN THE BREAKER WORE ON. I DEVELOPED A wordless language with Thomas Motion as our lessons evolved. Everything could be made for discourse, everything a code. The fixing of a stare on a joint in the chutes. The altering rhythm of hand and slate. Left hand to ear: a warning. Thumb to knee: a signal for readiness. A tug at your cap: a request for more tobacco.
Our lessons were like this: As Boggs passed on Thomas’s side, I leaned and spat a thick splodge of brown at the boss’s back. He whirled round and yanked Thomas down off the slat and flailed