was sure I could.
Mornings were for Aunt Shirley and me, and magic.
“You’re just like your Aunt Shirley,” Mom would say and mean it not in a good way. “You be careful you don’t end up like her, too.” By which she meant living in a railway caboose sixty miles north of Scout’s Landing on Blue Bird Lake, near the Red Dog Indian Reservation.
“She lets Indians sit at her table,” she’d whisper and shake her head.
I remember one day Mom and her friend Sylvia were sitting around smoking cigarettes and picking at a cinnamon coffee cake.
“A woman alone like that, well,” Mom said, “you can imagine.” She made her eyes as wide as possible and raised her eyebrows. She pulled her chin to her chest and three rolls of fat puffed out her neck. “I’d be very interested to know how she makes ends meet, if you catch my meaning.”
I was moused-up in a corner stool in the kitchen, under the African violets that crowded the windowsill. I ate spoonfuls of chocolate milk powder from the tin and tried to stay quiet enough so they’d forget I was listening.
“A touch of the tar brush there, I suspect,” she said. “You know, she’s only Bob’s half-sister. Some say their mother was—how shall I put this nicely?—friendly with...,” and she leaned over to Sylvia’s waiting ear and whispered something.
“No!” said Sylvia, her eyes wide as an owl.
“It’s what they say,” said Mom, nodding wisely, her finger against the side of her beaky nose.
I’d never heard that ‘tar brush’ expression before. I got my behind smacked smart later for asking Dad what it meant.
“It just means that whereas all the rest of the family’s fair, your Aunt Shirley’s got olive skin and black hair and brown eyes. That’s all it means, you understand?” said Dad. “Do you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, rubbing my stinging backside and feeling the injustice of the world. “I just asked.”
“Well, don’t,” he said, and huffed off to find Mom.
Then came the day of the third naked man, the one down in the orchard. It was one of those days when even though the sky’s clear as the chlorine-shocked public pool, there’s a crackle of something in the air. You wake up just knowing everybody’s going to be snappish and if something nasty has been waiting to happen, it’s going to happen today. And, sure enough, it wasn’t but lunch when all hell broke loose.
My mom and dad and Aunt Shirley had a whopper of a fight. The kind where I was thrown out of the house for the duration. Aunt Shirley’d been kinda sick on and off her whole visit, so sick a couple of days that we’d missed our wood walks. I thought it was mean as hell, my mother picking on her the way she did, and Mom chose a day when she was particularly under the weather to start the fight.
“You’d best go out and play for a time, Kathy. I need to have a few words with her,” Mom’d said jerking her neck in the direction of the bathroom where sounds of Aunt Shirley being sick could be heard.
“I want to stay and make sure she’s all right.”
“No. Out. Now.” She pointed to the door.
“D-a-a-d,” I pleaded.
“Go pick some berries or something,” he said, his stubby hands pushed way deep into the pockets of his jeans, his fingers rattling all his coins, which was never a good sign.
“Fine,” I said, as unhappily as I could, and grabbed the aluminium berry-pail from beside the sink.
I stood next to the side door of our house, pressed up against the prickly green stucco, trying to hear what was going on. After a few minutes, Aunt Shirley came out of the bathroom. My mom was waiting for her. At first, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their voices started to rise as they moved into the kitchen.
“You are a woman completely without shame!” my mother yelled.
“I have nothing to be ashamed of, Libby,” said Aunt Shirley.
“How can you say that? It’s indecent! It’s obscene!”
“Don’t get yourself all worked up now, Lib,” said my dad.
“Worked up? I’ll give you worked up! You haven’t seen worked up!”
“This really doesn’t concern you, now does it?” said Aunt Shirley. Her voice was as calm as always, the sound of a cool river breeze on a sweltering day.
“It certainly does concern me, as long as you insist on presenting yourself at my door, expecting to be taken in whenever you darn well feel like it. It concerns me as long as you keep trying to insinuate yourself into the affections of my only daughter!”
My ears were burning for sure now. I held my breath.
“Indians!” my mother yelled, as though a bunch of wild red men were coming in through the back window. “Indians! My God.”
“Not ‘Indians,’ Libby. Indian. His name is Daniel Migwins.”
“More likely the whole tribe on a bargain rate!”
“Libby, keep quiet a minute!” said my Dad. “I suppose you’re going to want to marry this guy?” Even though I couldn’t see him, I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was glowering something awful and was probably pulling at his ear the way he did when he was real mad.
“No, I don’t know whether I do or not. We haven’t decided.”
“That is it!” Mom’s voice rose way up to a squeak. “The last straw. You are not welcome here any longer, Shirley MacDonald. I will not have you around Kathy. You will leave my house.”
“Is that what you want too, Doug?” Aunt Shirley’s voice was so low I could barely hear it.
“It might be for the best. At least for a while.”
“I see.”
“I hope to heaven that you do!” said Mom.
“A fine mess you’ve made Shirley. Jesus! I need some air,” said Dad. His footsteps sounded on the linoleum floor and I dashed around the corner of the house and along the path to the berry patch. My heart pounded like a jackhammer.
I knew I better stay away for a while. So, I filled the pail halfway with berries. But all the time my mind was whirling with the information I’d heard.
When I went back to the house Dad told me I’d better head off for the afternoon. Let things cool down a little.
“Is Aunt Shirley going away?” I said.
“I don’t know, Kitten, I don’t know.” He ran his fingers through his thin hair. “Don’t you worry about it though, all right? Just go play some place for a few hours. Things’ll be better by dinner time. We’ll be all right.”
“What’d she do?”
He turned me round and gave me a gentle push.
“You ask too many questions. Git!”
So I and Ginny, who’s my best friend, went climbing trees near the stream in my orchard. We were sitting up high, peeling the bark off the dead branches and looking for the secret writing left on the smooth wood by worms, the trails and snaky lines we knew meant something mysterious. Secret Indian writing, maybe. Ginny was a branch lower than me. She had trouble climbing because she was chubby and her shorts were always too tight. She said she was afraid they’d split if she had to reach her legs too far. Ginny had long wheaty hair in a thick braid down her back. She said it weighed a ton and she wanted to cut it off but her mother wouldn’t let her because she said it was her best feature. I envied that hair.
Ginny dropped her head back and shrugged her shoulders to get the weight of the braid off her neck.