| WORLD VOICES DANCING FOR MY MOTHER
BY DUFF BRENNA |
Contents World
Voices Home |
This is
another new
life now. The house has only two big rooms and a closed-in porch, where
you
sleep on a cot next to the icebox. It has a dripping-pan that you are
taught to
empty twice a day. You give the water to the lettuce and tomato plants
in the
garden. The porch also has a door in the floor. A big ring in it lifts
out and
you can raise the door and go down concrete stairs to the basement.
Where you
will find wine barrels on cement ledges lining the walls, a narrow path
between
them. It’s musty mildewy dampish cobwebby creepy. Behind the porch is a
kitchen
dining room combination. On the right as you enter is a big bedroom.
There are
three beds in there, a narrow one for Carol Marie, a brass bed for
Grandpa
Mike, a normal double-sized bed for your parents. Every
morning
before sunrise, Grandpa Mike gets you up and takes you to the barn. You
feed
the animals. He milks Irini and fills a glass for you. Has you drink it
warm
and creamy. He wants to fatten you up. You too skeenee, kiddy, he says.
You
help clean the barn after the milking. Go to the coop and gather eggs.
Grandma
Mike taps a hole in the crown of an egg and tells you to suck the
contents out.
After you swallow the raw egg he gives you a dime. The two of you head
back to
the house for breakfast. When Grandpa Mike has eaten he takes his lunch
pail,
walks out to the road to catch his ride to the coalmine. Your parents
leave in
their ’47 Dodge 2-door for their jobs at Lowry Air Force Base in
Denver. Pappas
has enlisted. Your mother works as a waitress at one of the base
cafeterias.
She works six days a week, half days Saturdays. On
Sunday you
always have a fried chicken dinner, with mash potatoes and milk gravy
and peas.
Or maybe carrots. Or both. Grandpa Mike teaches you how to corner a
chicken and
catch it by throwing a gunny sack over it, reach under and grab it by
the legs,
lay it on the chopping block, take the hatchet and chop its head off,
throw the
body into the air, watching the wings flap, legs churning, blood
spouting,
until the chicken is still. Sundays you always kill two. Your mother
guts them
and Carol Marie and you pull the feathers, after they’ve been loosened
in hot
water. You don’t like any part of this stinky job, but no grownup seems
to be
bothered by it. They chatter and laugh. They give you laughing advice
as you
run the doomed chickens into corners and toss burlap over them. Swing
the axe
as if a severed head means nothing to you at all. Two men
come over
to help Grandpa Mike make wine. Crates of blue grapes are dumped inside
the
huge tub, the same one Carol Marie and you take once-a-week baths in
(her
first, you after), the same tub the rabbits float in when Grandpa Mike
has
broken their necks and pulled their coats off. The three men wear black
galoshes. They take turns stomping grapes, turning them pulpy. You are
allowed
to put galoshes on and stomp round and round the tub too. Grape juice
all over
your hands and face. Everyone laughs at you, the center of attention,
until
Grandpa Mike hauls you out of the tub and the men take over again. Each
load is
poured into an oak barrel. Water and dissolved sugar added. Stirred.
The barrel
is wrestled down to the basement. Grandpa Mike will add yeast tomorrow.
In a
few days he will press the pulp. Filter it. Discard it. Leave the juice
to
ferment. Cap it. Age it. By the
time all the
grapes are crushed and their stems discarded, your mother has made
dinner.
Everyone eats the chickens you’ve killed earlier. Afterwards the men
drink
wine, smoke cigars and talk in a language you don’t understand. It is
early
evening when they leave and you are told to go outside and move the
crates out
to the road, where someone will pick them up and take them to wherever
they
came from. 9
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