A Touching Love

He’s panting hard as he runs, spitting tiny clouds of mouth vapor into the pre-dawn November air. His feet don’t feel the cold ground through his worsted wool socks as he slips on patches of thin ice, dodges cowpats. Nor does he register the chill that mottles his hairless bare chest, exposed by his unbuttoned longjohns.
Five minutes earlier, heart hammering, Petey had staggered outside and headed toward the short meadow that he’s now crossing.
Ahead of him, against the inky indigo sky, hulks the silhouette of Mulroney’s ramshackle farm. But all Petey is seeing is the form of his seventy-year-old mother, Florence, dead under the quilt on her bed.
When she hadn’t come out of her bedroom beside the kitchen to cook his breakfast, he’d rapped on the door then stepped inside and found her: jaws agape, rheumy blue eyes staring at the cobwebbed ceiling.
Wheezing now, his stricken face gummy with tears and snot, he stumbles up his neighbor’s stone front steps and through the unlight porch toward the glow of a kerosene lamp in the kitchen.
Five pale-faced Mulroney boys jerk up from their breakfast bowls of boiled potatoes and sugared milk as Petey bursts in screeching, ‘Ma! Mama! Ma!’
The two oldest boys, Frank and Lewis, follow him back. From the foot of the wood bed they somberly view the body. On its sunken stomach rests a bony hand; the rheumatic fingers fan downward unnaturally in the shape of a half-chevron.
Agnes Mulroney trails them in her rubber boots and duffel coat. She stands in the kitchen doorway to catch her breath then tells Lewis to go feed the hens and fill the wood box in the front porch behind her.
In the bedroom, she says a prayer over the body of her friend then pulls the quilt over the dead woman’s face. As she leaves and pulls the door closed, its underside scrapes the warped wood floor.
Petey, perched on the edge of his chair at the pine kitchen table, hears this and lets loose an ear-piercing wail.
Agnes ignores him. She sends Frank to inform Father McIntyre and have him bring the undertaker. She picks up the rotary phone and asks the county operator to put her through to Florence’s oldest daughter, Carolyn, to break the news.
Then Agnes fires up the wood cookstove to boil tea water. She finds sliced bacon in the pantry’s small Frigidaire and fills a cast iron frypan. Finally she turns to Petey who’s sniffling with head in hands.
‘Go warsh your face and take off them shitty socks, boy.’
She sounds as kind as a hard life allows. Petey is mute. So she takes the pan off the heat and tends him directly, as one would a babe. As an afterthought, she hangs his jacket on his shaking shoulders.
Lewis comes in, eats his fill, and heads home. Father McIntyre, middle-aged and puffing with early gout, soon arrives, trailed by a self-important man from Dingwalls’ Funeral Home.
The priest blesses Florence’s remains as they are removed, then takes a chair at the kitchen table with Petey and Agnes and pours himself a mug of tea.
Eyes closed, Agnes is saying her rosary, index fingertip tapping on the worn oilcloth table cover as she completes each bead. Petey slouches in his chair and stares numbly out the kitchen window. The priest picks at the remaining bacon from a plate, then dozes, legs splayed.
Sunrise brightens the horizon as if to herald Carolyn whose old green Ford appears in the yard. She embraces Petey at the table then takes him up the back stairs to his small bedroom above the kitchen. When she comes down, Agnes gives her a mug of milky tea. Carolyn sips noisily and leans against the stove for warmth.
She says, ‘Petey and Ma have been here together for seven years.’
Sighing, she looks through the wide doorway leading to the parlour and the upstairs.
‘Eleven of us kids grew up here, and now he’s alone. He’s frightened, as you’d think.’
Father McIntyre rouses and motions towards Petey’s room.
‘Sure, he ain’t gonna live here now. Couldn’t mind hisself.’
Carolyn flashes irritation. ‘He’s slow, Father. Not stupid.’
‘I’ll be goin’,’ says Agnes.
Carolyn walks her to the front door, murmurs thanks. The priest comes up behind her, buttoning his coat, and shakes her hand.
‘She were a good woman,’ he says. ‘I’ll call ye later.’
Carolyn spends several hours making calls, checking in now and then on Petey, then naps on the kitchen couch. When Petey comes downstairs mid-afternoon, they eat and share a pot of tea without talking.
Then she says, ‘Leonard, Dolph, Morley, and Annie are coming back for the funeral. That’ll be on Thursday morning.’
She pats her brother’s hand. ‘We’ll all come together, just as Ma would’ve wanted.’
Petey is mute. There are circles under his brown eyes; his face is wan with grief.
When two neighbors come to pay respects, Carolyn takes him back to his room to spare him further upset. When they leave at twilight, she tidies up then sits at the kitchen table, arms folded across her ample chest, staring through the double casement window.
Outside, a rising full moon backlights a diorama of wire fence, poplar tree, and sloping meadow. It is quiet, like a stage set. It’s rare to hear any traffic from the country roadway. Tonight there is no wind, no other natural sounds. Nothing from Petey. The ticking of the kitchen clock seems to count off Carolyn’s choking sobs as they fill the room.
***
The next day, hubbub fills the large house as siblings and spouses start to arrive. Dolph, the youngest, born two years after Petey, brings his pre-teen children. They are quiet at first, as one is in a new space. Then the house fills with the sounds of their loud footsteps on the stairs and louder rock ‘n’ roll from a transistor radio.
Silence sits with the seven living children that Florence and Alex MacDonald raised in this farmhouse and who have come back together for her funeral. The passing of their garrulous whirlwind of a mother feels like the end of an era; like the last day of WWII, thirteen years ago.
Grief is compounded by memories of four brothers and their father who died at different times in the last two decades. Those losses are so real that it feels as if time has reversed.
But the calendar shows they’re already in a new era: it is 1962.
The seven brothers and sisters speak in low voices using vague gestures. Alone, or in twos and threes they walk through the rooms in the house and, like visitors, see it for the first time. They tour the outbuildings. They sit and reminisce. They cry.
But they don’t mourn long for themselves; soon, all eyes turn toward Petey. With Florence gone, his welfare is on everyone’s mind.
Listless, he doesn’t notice. At times he gets overwhelmed by the cacophony and slips away to curl in the barn’s hayloft. The barn cat, a mackerel-striped tabby, seems to feel his misery; it keeps watch from a dusty stall.
One afternoon, it observes Petey laying in the hay, hugging himself more for comfort than for warmth. Petey suddenly rears up, sneezes hard, and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. He sees the cat flinch at the noise.
He says, ‘You live alone. Me, too, now. What’s it’s like?’
The cat tucks its front paws under its body and starts to purr. Petey stares at it.
‘You seem alright. I never seen you with the crazies.’
He pauses, plucks at the dry mulch around him.
‘I’m sorry Ma wouldn’t let you in the house. I asked her to, but she said the barn was your place.’
He nibbles on a clover top, thinks.
‘She said everyone had a rightful place. Mine is here.’
He realizes Florence is gone and chokes a sob, then rises and brushes off his dungarees and shirt.
‘Well… mebbe it’ll be ok. Mebbe I won’t get the crazies either.’
***
A steady trail of people from the county’s villages and hamlets come to express their condolences. Some linger to surreptitiously nose about; others to opine impolitely on the dead woman’s ways and her adult children’s lives.
There is gossip about ‘that simple son of hers,’ Petey.
He’s the one fell on his head as a babe, warn’t he? Well, she was old when she had him; that made him slow. Sure, he’ll go live with one of them now.
Anticipating a sale, some of the women mourners cast appraising eyes on the farmhouse; some of the men walk around and evaluate the fields and unused outbuildings.
On Thursday, after the funeral mass, Petey and his brothers tote their mother’s nearly weightless casket into the village cemetery where Dingwalls had managed to dig a grave in the cold dirt. Florence is buried under the red soil beside Alex, her parents, and her grandparents.
On Friday, one by one, family members start to leave. They part from Petey with affection but with little reluctance. Each has outgrown this place which had once been their entire world.
Carolyn, Leonard, and Reggie come to ask Petey to make his home with one of them. He stares into the distance as he mulls their invitation.
‘No,’ he says.
They are surprised. Petey knows how to take care of himself, but surely he won’t want to live alone. Not isolated down by the seashore. Not in a big house full of memories.
‘They’s no place for me out there,’ he says with a sweeping gesture toward the packed-dirt lane and the county road beyond.
‘Be like takin’ a trout from the brook and dumpin’ it down at the shore.’
Despite entreaties and a few threats, he stands firm. Of all the children, Petey had always embodied the innate obstinacy of a MacDonald.
So it is agreed that since Carolyn, Marie, and Mabel all live within thirty miles, they will keep an eye on him as their busy families allow. Father McIntyre is also enlisted since he lives nearest the homestead.
By Friday, the last of the family say farewell and catch the ferry to the mainland.
Petey’s siblings have left the Frigidaire stocked with a meat pie, roast chicken, and boiled ham. The tin bread box holds fresh biscuits and gingerbread. Washing is done and folded. The wood box is full.
On Saturday morning, he wakes before dawn as usual and rolls over in his unpainted iron bed to gaze out the dormer window. Venus twinkles above the tops of the spruce trees flanking the house.
Sitting up, he grips the striped ticking that covers his thin mattress.
This old clapboard house is on the north side of the island. Closer to the water than the land, as his father would say. The lane leads a quarter mile from the road to the house.
Petey listens hard. There is no creak from downstairs, no shush from the shore several hundred meters behind the house. Even the barn swallows aren’t awake to chitter.
He is alone for the first time in his twenty-nine years of life. From his mouth pours a howl like that of a wounded pup.
Some of the Mulroneys hear the sound as it carries across the meadow.
Foxes, mutters the eldest.
***
In his first week living alone, Petey sometimes forgets to visit the henhouse and a fox feasts on the eggs. The sweet-eyed Guernsey’s bawling reminds him to milk her, but he often leaves the full pail on the ground, where it sours, and has to pour it on the manure pile.
Some biscuits in the breadbox get mouldy. He cuts off the green bits and eats them anyway with mugs of King Cole tea. It’s strong, just as Ma would have made it. The sharp bite of tannin in every sip makes her absence seem like a bad dream.
Mid-week, a sharp stink of ammonia from Florence’s closed bedroom informs Petey that, in the flurry after her death, no one had thought to empty his mother’s chamber pot. He shivers with cold as he steps into her north-facing bedroom.
His sisters had honored Petey’s plea to leave the room untouched after they stripped the bed. Florence’s dark crepe church dresses and coats hang in the closet alongside some of Alex’s clothes. A flowered halter apron and a striped nightgown drape from a door hook.
After struggling to push up the ill-fitting sash window to air the space, he pulls a white ceramic pot from under the bed, leaves to empty it in the outhouse. He hangs it on a spike in the barn.
Returning, he stands abjectly in the middle of the bedroom for some time. Beside the bureau is a white pine rocking chair with red roses painted on the face of the top rail. He gingerly lowers himself onto the low seat. The narrow runners creak on the dark, varnished floor as he rocks, eyes closed.
Finally the air in the room refreshes. Petey sits up and sniffs loudly, like a bloodhound. He smells… roses.
***
One summery day when Petey was twelve, Florence stepped outside to toss the bucket of scrub water and noticed him by the side of the henhouse.
He leaned down across the weathered pole fence that butted up to the structure and stretched his upper torso around the side. His arms moved back and forth, then his shoulders shook.
Florence’s mind flashed back to the motions that Morley was making the day she caught him throttling a cat.
She broke into a trot, her sore knee protesting, and yanked Petey’s elbow just as he was again twisting his bony torso around the shingled wall.
‘Petey, what in god’s name are ya doing? Stop that! What…?’
Her son wheeled around, his palms speckled with blood, one hand clutching something red.
‘Ma! What…? You scared me, Ma!’
His brown eyes were the size of marbles.
‘I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ bad, Ma. I was only pickin’ roses.’
Her heart dropped, then her head.
‘Petey.…’
She saw that the rose vines’ thorny stems had pricked his hands.
‘I’m sorry, boy. It looked like you was… or that somethin’…’
Florence swallowed the rock in her throat. She couldn’t admit her terrible thoughts. Petey smiled and poked a small bouquet in her face, sending slender crimson petals to dot her boots.
‘Ain’t they beautiful? Smell ‘em, Ma, smell ‘em!’
Her eyes puddled and her hands shook in mortification at having misread her son.
‘They’s fer you, Ma.’
Petey peered at her face, unsure. She walked him back to the kitchen and served him a bowl of biscuits laden with fresh strawberries and a river of cream. For once, she didn’t chide Petey for making ugly eating noises. She was too busy reciting the Act of Contrition under her breath.
***
Hearing the creak of runners now, Petey calls out, ‘Ma?’
His face falls, realizing he’s making the noise. Sniffing, he pulls open the top bureau drawer. Scattered atop folds of pale tissue paper are small hand-made sachets. He puts one to his nose. Rose petals.
Lifting some of the paper he sees white gloves. Two are made of cotton and hemmed with lace. His mother’s Sunday gloves. Beside them is another pair. The tissue crackles as he pulls one free.
It’s as long as the neck of a swan he’d seen in a picture book, and slick as ice to his touch. He is mystified. Then he sees a small handwritten card that says, Merry Christmas, love Annie.
Suddenly it dawns on Petey that he’s snooping. He ducks his head and shuts the bedroom door, pulls the thin curtains across the narrow window, then returns to the open bureau drawer.
He slips the long soft glove over the slender fingers of his left hand; the cloth snags a bit on his chapped skin. He touches the satiny cloth to his bristly cheeks.
Mulroney’s baby lambs ain’t half as soft.
Shocked by the sensation on his skin, he pulls off the glove and folds it back under its tissue blanket, shuts the drawer, and tiptoes out of the room.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Petey looks at his hands as if for the first time. The fingernails are grubby; two are cracked. His dry palms make a raspy sound as he rubs them together.
From the Frigidaire he retrieves a blue bowl of cloudy bacon grease and massages a blob on each finger then on his palms.
Years ago, when he’d first done this, his mother had looked at him sharply then marched him to the porch sink and made him wash his hands in the freezing well water using lye soap.
That was because he’d shared his feelings about girls.
***
The day it had dawned on Petey that girls were more than sisters, he had suffered a multitude of small agonies listening to his friend, Cliffy, talk about smooching Myrtle McPhee.
Cliffy rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, and made odd rolling motions with his hips as he discussed what he’d do and how he’d do it. Whether or not Myrtle liked it.
Petey felt funny in his stomach listening to this strange talk. When he couldn’t bear any more he threw a small rock at Cliffy and stormed off, red-faced.
The rock missed his friend, but Petey’s reaction didn’t.
Cliffy said, “Don’t nevermind, Petey, you know I’m always shootin’ off my mouth. Besides, Myrtle wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
Petey went home later for dinner and when his mother asked about his day he described the conversation. As a mother with seven sons, Florence wasn’t shocked. But she had been blind to how much Petey was growing up.
Banging a pot of boiled potatoes down on the stovetop, she whirled on him.
‘You must promise me, Petey, in God’s holy name, that ….’