Mo(u)rning Song

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 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.

Clara leaves to go and do something, deal with something, and I follow my mother around the house a bit because I don’t quite know what to say with her all tense, but I want her to say something. I want to say something. My mouth is stuck shut, and finally I just sit at the kitchen table while she kneads bread and her body stays that strong, tight line.

“He’s trying,” she says abruptly, like it’s a curse, and smacks the dough hard on the counter.

“Could try harder,” I say, because I have always been hard, and unwavering, and crystal sharp in my core. There’s never been much softness there, and I don’t know that I’ve ever learned how to forgive. I remember hysterical weeping. Shrieking fear. Not understanding rage or what was done wrong. Apologies, too.

Brianna, a single shocked sob. Dunno if she got an apology, still.

Mom sighs, smacks the bread dough. Starts kneading again. Flours the dough. Starts the grinder on the counter, which starts to scream as it pounds the wheat to flour.

You tell me some time when I’m fairly small— time is hard for me, you know, even if you still don’t grasp you’re part of the problem of why— that if I can’t sit still for General Conference, you could do like your father did and tie me to a chair to be forced to sit still. That memory lingers with me. Maybe linger isn’t even the word for him. That memory stains me, better say. Like spilled leather stain, impossible to get out. Your leather hands are like his leather hands, but I think you were probably always the better man.

You would hate if I said that to you, so I won’t, but I will think it. I will write it here, your child the fiction writer telling stories, so you can believe this is nothing but a story about some other man, and some other father. Fragments, memories, stories, what else are they?

My mother portions out the dough, and places the loaves in the bread tins to rise. They look, I think, like tiny swaddled babies, their dough almost the color of my skin with the dense wheat she uses. I remember you both bringing home the old grinding mill, the one made of wood back in the ‘20s, which her mother pulled out of storage. It’s too loud to speak over, the stones inside screaming along and pummeling wheat to fresh flour, the brown cord of the box shaking with the wood and shaking with the grain.

You come downstairs, look at her, smile easy.

I love that grinder, and its polished dense wood, and how you run your hand over it and look at my mother, who looks back at you with eyes like glacier diamond melting, and the two of you say absolutely nothing at all of each other, ever. Eighteen years difference and no one believes me when I say it, you who are light as air despite your sorrows, her heavy as granite despite her joys.

“You’ve got it singing again,” you tell her when it’s finished screaming.

“Seeing as the two of us couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, someone’s gotta,” she tells you, like

the pair of you aren’t a perfect baritone-alto pair, and you laugh like riverwater-on-rocks, catching the joke.

Here are things I know about my grandfather, who no one wants to talk about in more than the grand details of a life richly lived, who you tell me tales of too that may or may not be true: He helped bring back the Appaloosa, and a good quarter of the success of the breed is due to him. He had you breaking those same horses by putting your tiny, starved body on the backs of them at age four, same as your brothers but never your sisters. He worked tirelessly for the betterment of his family. My grandma was always pregnant, always working better and more stable jobs, always reading and cooking and raising children that were dying too fast in the desert. You were dirt poor, but he made your lives rich. You lived in a literal hole carved into the banks of a dead river, a dugout house, because you were poorer than dirt and he would accept no charity from the rich men he worked with. He was an innate mathematician with uncanny and excellent spatial awareness and a frankly unnatural skill at golf. Grandma got teased about finding a new man at the latest reunion and I could see the twist in her face that everyone ignored, the faint shake in her voice when she said one man was enough. How do you condense a man the size of a sun into stories?

Here is also what I know about my grandfather. You loved him. You love him still. You love him so much I feel my heart might break in two if I tried to carry that same amount of love. It wounds you to the core that he’s gone. It wounds you even deeper that my grandma may yet go soon. And you know that he was wrong, and that’s where you halt the cycle of abuse throttling us. You are still the better man, even when I hate you.

I think about this man that I hate, just a little, just enough, and I think about you, and think about how I never want children who can learn just how much I love you and hate you the way I think everyone might love and hate their parents, and I desperately hope you’re never gone out of my life. I think about your father, who taught you too many ugly lessons too young, and you who I will mourn and be viciously glad of being free of by turns and by tragedy.

I wonder what songs I will sing at your funeral, and whether my fictitious mouth will know how to speak the honest truth of you, and finally snap the cycle clean in two— one part to bury, one to rise.