This goes with the
September 22, 2019 post - it's just taken this long for Jason to have some
writing time to put his thoughts together from our time together!
My wife’s Great Aunt Eleanor came to stay. She cut the
ends off the beans I brought in from the garden, she jumped up and washed
dishes after every supper, she stooped to gather chestnuts and sat on the
ground to smash the hulls off of walnuts. Though she says her hands are
starting to look a little funny, they and her back don’t hurt her. For that,
she said, she is thankful.
She is nearly the last of those she knew. Her mother, she
told us around our Virginia dinner table, died after birthing her sister, who
had to be sent to live with her grandparents. Eleanor was about three, she
thought. Our youngest is three now. Over the nine days of her visit, they spent
hours together watching trees: on the porch swing under the walnuts, or at a
picnic table by the chestnuts. “I like to sit,” she said, “Where I can watch
things fall.”
She grew up in Pennsylvania, just miles from where I did,
but fifty years earlier. One evening she described for us the world she knew
there; things she hadn’t remembered in a long time: There was the brook where
she would lie on her belly in the water and feast her eyes on pebbles. The
slate sink with the hand pump in the kitchen. Everyone sitting at the table
with a heap of black walnuts to be shelled. Fun, she said, was not part of their
family life. But shelling walnuts together was something she enjoyed.
She recalled walking in the door to the scent of a
chicken (a real chicken) cooking in a pot; errands to where the butcher had a
shop over the hill; a time the children gathered there to watch workers
slaughter a steer; the way his head was pulled down by a ring installed through
his nose and tethered to the floor; how his blood spilled away. She remembered
the waste pipe running underground from the shop, emptying its red fluids into
the stream where the children used to splash and wade. “It didn’t hurt us any,”
she said.
She never could swim. “I’m not proud of that,” she said.
“Everyone should learn.” Some eighty-five years after it happened, she
recounted to us the fear of a boy tossed into a pond by his friends: “What a
terrible thing to do to a person!” If he survived the war that may have come
for him; if in his own late years there has been someone to hear his stories,
has he told of the day he was hauled from the water—coughing and flailing—by
the same laughing boys who threw him in? Did he mention (did he notice?) the
small girl clinging to a wire fence, looking on with pity, the water up to her
neck?
Our eight-year-old had a friend over one of the evenings,
and that time we could hardly finish a sentence for the noise of giggles. We
apologized, but Eleanor said don’t worry, that girls sound the same everywhere,
and told of the Catholic teen she had known, at whose home she’d spent the
night once after their shirt-making shift. Their giggles after dark drew
shushes from the Irish parents on the other side of the bedroom curtain-wall.
Those giddy girls! Could they have known their peril?
Each would step or lean or fall into her future; it’s a past now, rendered
simple in the telling. Eleanor is 94: So much has come to her--8 children
(she’s still plagued by stressful dreams of laundry), a true marriage long and
joyous, faith and optimism through the decades, open-eyed contentment and a
wealth of love--since those two girls walked out together from the factory,
their laughter brilliant in the waning light.
Jason Myers-Benner,
September 2019
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