Mo(u)rning Song Vinn McBride, First Place It’s a thoroughly unremarkable kind of Saturday when Clara Harmon comes to our house to drop papers to Mom and they get to talking, as one does when you’re women with kids who are your entire tiny, painful world. You’re the ward executive secretary then, so she’s seen you just the day before while waiting for an interview. “Y’know, I had a good chat with Jameson just th’other night,” she says to my mother, and they’re a study in contrasts. My mother is a tall stick figure of a woman, with her hair already silver in her thirties. She looks decades older than she should, and she is nothing but powerful, useful muscle. Clara is tall too, but tall in the real way, not just from presence, and lushly full figured from six kids with everyone knowing a seventh will come sooner than later. “He was talking to me about raising just girls, and how he’s making changes so they’re not raised how he was raised. The world’s better with that kind of thinking.” I miss Mom’s verbal response, but I see it [ 113 ]
in every line of her body, how she leans in the door frame. My mother is all hard lines, and toughness seeped into her body too young, but I can see whole conversations she’s had with you that I’ll never hear in that sentence. You hit my sister the other day, in a fit of excessive anger, the first time you’ve done so. The last time you hit me was years and years back, after that same sister nearly got frostbite because I locked the doors to keep the cold out, as you’d taught me, and she couldn’t get in and I never heard her knock. But I am seeing other conversations too, echoes of the past, and the word raised sits with me like a fat, ugly frog that won’t blink. I knew early on, I will admit. Even in my faint and foggy memories of that man and the house on B Road I can remember the tension in grandma’s back, starting to curve. The way the whole room gravitated around him, this skinny old man with his long cane and sharp eyes and Western shirts that my grandma made from the same pattern she made all your shirts from, the pattern I saw in well-loved bits, I remember that all very clearly. I remember too how happy you were to see him, how you orbited around him like he was the sun made flesh. But then too you would say things, little things, and mom would go soft and tight and unhappy all together, and I think, if he had lived long enough for me to know, I think I would have hated him for you.
