Five October 1966 #2
“Of course, Sally. You are always welcome here. You and the boys can have my bedroom, and I’ll bunk with Aliet until Ben comes.”
If it had been anyone but Sally, I might have protested, but I loved her, even when she was scolding me. When not scolding, she had a way of making me feel special, included. Sally always had a kind word for me, and Ben always a penny, which I saved in a little tin can I kept hidden under my bed.
For two days, Sally slept in Kiju’s bed, and I slept pushed up against the wall of my bedroom, my grandmother, who was prone to snoring, beside me.
During the day, Sally mostly sat. Her roundness prevented her from doing much else.
I tried to be of help, rubbing her swollen feet, getting her tea and playing with the boys.
The youngest had just been weaned and still cried occasionally for the breast, but aside from that they were good children.
Well-behaved, as much as young boys, full of energy, could be.
Over the next few days, the rest of the apple pickers began to arrive.
While I loved this time of year and the atmosphere it brought with it, I was disappointed to see my cousin Kenneth among them.
Ever since we got lost in the woods, Kenneth had started to get mean.
He was always a little unkind, but he was getting worse each time I saw him.
Ever since his father had dragged him away by the arm, muttering curse words under his breath, Kenneth seemed distant, on his own in every way.
And I wouldn’t understand why for three full decades.
It made me feel only a little better knowing he wasn’t really my cousin.
My grandmother had taken in his mother when she needed a place to stay long before he was born, and so he had somehow gained the right to call her Kiju.
I don’t know if he was an ugly boy or if I just perceived him to be ugly because of how he treated me, but in my mind’s eye he was just about the ugliest boy in the world, with short, cropped hair because of the lice and teeth already beginning to colour with rot.
When he arrived that fall, the first thing he did was seek me out.
Not to catch up, not to play a game of tag.
His motivation seemed to be to make me feel bad.
I was attempting to avoid him by weaving in and around the tents when he jumped out in front of me.
“Hey there, orphan half-breed,” he sneered.
He hadn’t seen John come up behind him.
“Shut your mouth, Kenneth. Don’t listen to him, Aliet. He’s not one to talk about being mixed.”
Kenneth balked and turned to walk away, cursing John under his breath.
“John,” I said, perhaps louder than the greeting required, “I was afraid you weren’t coming this year.”
He walked toward me and embraced me in a quick hug.
“We just got here.” He turned and pointed to where his parents were setting up their tent.
His mother waved and I waved back. “You need to ignore Kenneth. He just likes to be an ass. He’s that way in school, too.
And he won’t tell you, but his dad is half too. ”
John walked quietly beside me until we got to his camp. I didn’t even have time to say my hellos to his family before I heard my grandmother calling me to dinner.
Kenneth’s father was an ass, that’s what my grandmother called him.
That’s why Kenneth’s mother left and moved to Boston.
Too many times she had to explain a bruise or a broken bone.
I never knew my grandmother to hate someone, she always said hate was wasted on the hater, but boy, did she hate Kenneth’s father, and she warned me to stay away from him, especially when he got into the drink.
Regardless, Kiju always made allowances for Kenneth, even now.
It was something I never understood. If anyone had asked me, I would have told them he was rotten to his core, but Kiju said that all souls needed love, even Kenneth.
I had half a mind to remind her of what she said about his father, but I kept it to myself.
And while I like to think that I am a good person, I never reserved my good thoughts for Kenneth; he only ever received my scorn.
And in the end, after what he did, I don’t think there is anyone on earth who would say he didn’t deserve it.
After a quiet dinner of just Kiju and myself, I made my way over to Sally’s fire.
She’d moved out of the house that morning after receiving word that Ben was on his way.
Kiju had lent her one of the kitchen chairs and we’d pushed the legs into the earth to make sure it didn’t tip on her.
I sat on the ground across from her and whispered the word and let it roll around in my head, repeating it in clenched whispers. Half-breed.
“Sally, am I a half-breed?”
She looked at me, the youngest asleep on her lap, the other entertaining himself with a stuffed toy dog.
“Good god, Aliet, where did you learn that? You are exactly what the ancestors had in mind, and I won’t hear another word about it.
” She handed me the sleeping baby as she got up to put a kettle over the open fire.
As I looked down at the child, so peaceful and quiet, the word and all it implied vanished off my tongue and slipped out of my mind.
Sally could do that, could make me forget the unpleasant things. Most of them, but not all.
When the baby woke, I let him grip my hair, the strands tangled up in his pudgy little fingers.
He was the spitting image of Big Ben, although I would never tell Sally that.
She got pretend annoyed when people said that, afraid that none of her children were ever going to look like her.
She pretended it didn’t, but I think that secretly it bothered her.
They did have her brown eyes, though. The oldest boy sat by the fire playing in the dirt, drawing pictures with a small twig and pulling grass and arranging it in a way that only he could understand.
As the sun began to sink and I waited for my grandmother to call my name to come home, Big Ben wandered across the field toward his wife and kids.
He was one of the last to arrive, never knowing how long he was going to be out on the boat.
All depends on the catch is what he always said.
Sally didn’t like him going on the fishing boats for days at a time, but the money was good.
“If he keeps putting these babies in me, he’s going to have to spend a lot more time at sea. Gotta feed them all now,” she laughed as he bent down to kiss her on the forehead.
“Well hello, Aliet,” he said with more enthusiasm than was necessary, and I blushed.
“Hi, Big Ben.”
“I got something for ya.” He bent down to where I was sitting with his son and turned my small, freckled hand over and placed a penny in my palm before closing my fingers around it. “Now don’t spend it all in one place.”
With each new penny, I’d tried to map the details of his hand.
The broken lines, the shape of his nails.
I would compare them to mine, trying to find any likeness.
But hands are different, they are not the same as noses or eyes, or the shape of a chin or dimples.
All I saw were the weathered hands of a man who worked hard.
There could be no real comparison to my small, pale, thin fingers and half-moon nails, which Kiju cleaned and shaped on Sunday evenings.
But I looked nevertheless, hoping against hope to find some resemblance.
Kenneth never got a penny from Big Ben, and that day he saw me get one. The next day, as I patiently waited for supper to be ready, I was sitting on the step, knife in hand and the stick I’d been working on starting to resemble an acorn, when he walked by.
“Big Ben isn’t your father, you know.”
“I never said he was.” I was surprised and a little embarrassed that Kenneth knew what I was thinking.
“But you want him to be.”
“What does that even mean? You’re such an idiot.” I was unnerved that he could read me so well.
“I think your father is the man who buys our baskets, the one with the curly red hair and missing thumb.”
I stood up so fast that my acorn flew into the air and fell near his feet. He looked down before lifting his foot and bringing it down hard, crushing the wooden acorn under his boot. When I heard it crack, I felt my anger rise.
“What are you going to do without John here to save you?” he sneered.
I clenched my fists at my sides as he started to laugh.
Not the happy laughs we might have shared just a year ago, but one that held malice.
He was surprised when I walked up to him, looked into his ugly face and punched him square in the nose.
His head flew back, and he stumbled but didn’t fall.
Blood dripped down his chin. My knuckle was split, a cut the size of his two front teeth.
My own blood seeped in between the clenched fingers of my fist. I wasn’t even sorry I did it.
He wiped his hands on his pants, turned and walked away.
“Half-breed bastard,” he whispered under his breath, but loud enough for me to hear. I started to walk toward him, but he took off running, checking over his shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following.
He never did tell Kiju that I gave him a bloody nose. I don’t know what he told his father, but I never got into trouble. Big Ben had been walking by on his way to the outhouse and saw the whole thing.
“Get that cleaned up,” was all he said, motioning to my hand, as he continued on his way.