Five October 1966
FIVE
The apple pickers started coming to the field across the road after a tragedy befell the family that usually hosted them: a child gone missing.
The family lived on the other side of town, close to the train tracks.
Ten minutes by car, but since we didn’t have one, it was a one-hour walk.
Apparently, some of the pickers were family, but there never seemed to be a clear definition of family for us.
Someone I’d never met would be introduced as a cousin.
Blood was less important than a shared history.
None of the Indians lived in town; neither did the Black folks.
We all lived on the edges, a testament to our place in the world.
Never at the centre, always on the periphery, easily forgotten, easily ignored.
So, in the aftermath of this terrible event, the apple pickers, some direct from the blueberry fields of Maine, came to camp in our field, allowing the family their time to grieve.
Big Ben and Sally had always come to our field, along with a few others, but after the child went missing, there were many more.
Every evening in October began to feel like a carnival.
Music played well into the night. Songs were sung and fires were lit—for food and, occasionally, a good ghost story.
The heartbeat of Mother Earth echoed off the drums and scattered through the trees.
Every so often a fight. But those were rare, and the disagreement was generally resolved by sun-up.
After the school bus deposited me home in the late afternoon, I liked to see if anyone new had arrived.
A few would call out my name, having known my mother.
They would remind me of how much I looked like her and they would hug me, as if her death had been recent and I required comforting.
As if I was still grieving. It must have made them feel better, to touch a part of her still on this side of the spirit world.
But it felt different to me. It only made me think of how little I did grieve her.
I didn’t know then, and I’m still not entirely sure now, how to grieve properly.
I grieved her when I held the small items in the house that once belonged to her.
I used the same hairbrush she had once used, and I would get lost in the brushing and think about how she probably stood in the same spot in the bathroom in front of the little mirror and brushed her hair.
My hand was where her hand had been. I grieved for her when I saw friends with their mothers.
I grieved for her when Kiju told her stories.
I grieved the absence of a photo. I grieved, but I never cried.
The clouds and I, heartless in our refusal to weep, and while Kiju held it against the sky, she must have forgiven me.
But that October, grief, and the guilt I held around the lack of it, was as fleeting as the sparks from the dozens of fires lit for cooking, or the apples tucked away inside coat pockets, brought out and given as gifts.
I am convinced that nothing in the world is better than the taste of a fresh Cortland apple kissed by the cool October air.
I was someone else during those cool autumn evenings; I was Aliet, I was Kiju’s granddaughter, and I was Maggie’s girl.
I found comfort in wrapping a blanket over my shoulders and wandering among the pickers, fetching water or holding squirming babies while their mothers ran to the outhouse.
I was the Aliet I never was anywhere else.
I was comfortable, I was content, and I sometimes crave the girl I was then.
It was early October, our second year of hosting the big crowd, and Kiju was in the kitchen cooking supper.
John and his family had yet to arrive. One of the other families told us they had stayed in Maine to haul potatoes and onions.
When I heard this, my heart sank and I resigned myself to thinking they wouldn’t come at all.
I was sitting outside on the front step trying to channel the spirit of my grandfather.
I had stripped the bark off a piece of a branch with a knife my grandmother had given me.
Not his knife—I wasn’t ready for that yet.
The knife he used for carving delicate scenes into wood sat in the same wooden box as his photo.
It sat alongside Kiju’s knife, the one used for separating mother from newborn, the one engraved with the word we’ ji’wet, to give birth.
I never did earn my grandfather’s knife, and by the time I earned Kiju’s, she was gone.
I wish she had been around to give it to me herself. I think she would have been proud.
“They will both be yours someday. Either by talent or my death.”
I stopped what I was doing and looked at her as if she’d proclaimed her death to be imminent.
“Aliet, I’m not going anywhere. I just mean that you need to show me your dedication to using these knives as they were intended.
And if neither carving nor guiding babies into the world is your calling, you will get the knives when I cross over to meet your mother and grandfather.
But if I am being honest, I do hope that you carry on one, if not both, of these things.
I hope that isn’t too much of a burden.” She smiled and made her way into the backyard, where I heard her talking to the pig.
On this particular day, I was concentrating on carving the image of an acorn.
A perfectly formed one, its little hat still affixed, sat on the step beside me for reference.
The branch I’d chosen was wide and had a small bulb protruding from it.
I was concentrating hard on removing the bulb without breaking the branch when I looked up to see a woman walking up our driveway.
I raised my hand to my eyes to block the late-day sun and get a better look.
She swayed as she walked, and the closer she got, the more I could make out the shape of her.
She carried one baby on her back and the other on her hip, a suitcase in the other hand.
“Kiju, it’s Sally,” I hollered. The acorn rolled off the step as I jumped up, closed my knife and placed it in my pocket. I shoved the branch I’d been working on under the step for safekeeping.
“Kiju,” I hollered again.
“I heard you.” She came to the door, held open with a wedge of wood to let the cool autumn air inside. “Well, seems that girl comes to my house just to have babies. Look at the belly, round and hard. Even from here, I can tell she’s nearly ready. I must have a talk with Ben.”
Kiju laughed. I laughed too, even though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe it was the thought of Big Ben getting scolded by my grandmother, the smallest woman I knew, and Ben the largest man I’d ever seen.
“Go to the well and get her some water.”
I grabbed the bucket from the kitchen and ran out the back door.
I placed the bucket under the pump and forced the lever down until water came gushing out, clean and clear.
Our well was fed from a natural spring that ran far under the earth and Kiju proclaimed it to be the best water Mother Earth had to offer.
The water sloshed over the sides of the bucket as I raced across the yard to greet Sally.
She was seated now with Kiju crouched behind her, rubbing her back.
The younger boy slept under a blanket, held up with two sticks draped over the top to keep the sun off him.
His birthmark, so red last fall when he rushed into the world, had faded, a small mark just below his right eye.
Kiju said that birthmarks came from the ancestors, marking their favourites, but I didn’t really know.
Sometimes I thought she made things up to trick me.
And I didn’t seem to have one, no matter how much I looked.
I liked to think it was buried somewhere in my hair as thick as a horse tail, said Kiju.
The older boy sat at his mother’s side, his chin on his chest as he struggled to stay awake, curious about his new surroundings.
Last fall, around the same time, I had watched my grandmother help birth the youngest. I’d been too young to help but old enough to sit with the women, to learn the song my grandmother sang only at a birth, to hear the first cry of a new soul.
To sit under that tree, to be part of someone’s creation story.
“You look well, Sally,” I said, as I dipped a cup into the bucket and handed it to her.
“You’re sweet, Aliet. I don’t feel like I look all that well.
I’m as big as a house. And as much as I wanted a girl, I think this one will be another boy.
” She held the cup to the older child’s lips, and he took a sip.
She reached over and rubbed the tummy of the sleeping child.
Kiju was still on the ground behind her, kneading Sally’s lower back with her knuckles.
Little sighs of relief escaped Sally’s lips.
“Did you take the train?” Kiju asked.
“I did. And this one was a rascal, running up and down the aisle.” She looked crossly at the older boy, but he just stared back, his brown eyes so big.
My grandmother said he would grow into them one day, but I wasn’t as sure.
Sally couldn’t stay cross with him, and kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on his forehead, and he smiled before laying his head on his mother’s thigh, drifting into sleep.
“And no one offered you a ride from the station?” It was Kiju’s turn to sound cross.
“No, but I don’t mind. After sitting for so long, it was nice to get up and move a bit.
And I don’t have a lot. Ben will be bringing the rest in a day or two.
I thought I might ask you to help me a bit until he comes?
” Her voice went low. “I would have waited for him, but I didn’t want to be alone if this one came while he was out fishing. ” She rubbed her belly.