KNITTING LESSONS
Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young.
THE LULA SYSTEM I’d devised ended up working well enough, at least for the next few weeks. I invited her over to play piano after school, and we learned a couple of popular duets at our mothers’ request. We knew we wouldn’t have to play them at the next recital. Or any recital, for that matter. Then I made the mistake of inviting her over to work on one of our Domestic Arts assignments together and Mother got a good look at her stitches. Lord have mercy, how could I have been so stupid?
“Calpurnia,” said Mother a few days later, in a tone I dreaded, “I think it’s time you graduated from knitting scarves to socks. There’s nothing like good, thick woollen socks made by a pair of loving hands. If we start now, you’ll have time to make a pair for all your brothers before Christmas, maybe even for Father and Grandfather, as well. Wouldn’t that be nice? Bring your knitting bag, and we’ll sit in the parlor.”
The pressure was on.
I sighed and put down my magnifying glass. I was in the middle of preserving a particularly nice specimen of Viceroy butterfly in a framed glass to hang next to Granddaddy’s specimens in the library, but it was raining outside and the delicate work was tough without direct sunlight.
Mother seemed pleased by the skeins of new wool that she pulled from her own bag, which bristled with needles of every size. The wool was a fine dark chocolate brown and bound in thick hanks. She sat with her hands out like paddles while I unwound the skeins and rewound them into a ball. Although I was not excited at the prospect of knitting socks, the rhythmic shuttling of the wool back and forth was hypnotic, and I grudgingly had to admit that there might be worse ways to spend a rainy day. Might be. Mother also seemed calmed and relaxed by this timeless domestic ritual; knitting always seemed to soothe her headaches, and she didn’t need such frequent doses of Lydia Pinkham’s.
The weather had cooled somewhat. Although it wasn’t warranted, a small fire of pecan logs popped in the fireplace to foster the illusion that summer was well past us. Travis wandered in with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. He dangled some wool before them and soon had them springing back and forth and tumbling on the carpet. Lamar came in and at Mother’s request put some Schubert songs on the gramophone.
“Let’s start with socks for Jim Bowie, shall we?” said Mother. “Some small plain ones. We’ll learn about patterns later. Cast on a row of, oh, let’s say forty stitches, and we’ll start at the calf.” She handed me four tiny knitting needles.
“Four?” I frowned. “What do I do with four?”
“You knit in a perpetual circle instead of turning back at the end of a row.”
Help! I was clumsy enough with two needles. This was going to be much worse than I thought. Mother made encouraging noises while I cast on the first row of my first sock. There were so many sharp needle points sticking out at unexpected angles that it was like juggling a porcupine.
“Look,” she said, “if you wrap the wool around your fourth finger like this, it’s easier to control the tension, and the stitches stay even.” I tried to do as she showed me, and to be truthful, the next row did look better. The one after that looked better still. I noticed that once you got into a certain rhythm, the stitches flowed down the needle so that you picked up the next one before you knew it.
“Now we begin to cast off to make it narrower toward the ankle. Yes, that’s right.”
Slowly—exceedingly slowly—the mess of wool in my hands began to take shape. The afternoon passed, and although I wouldn’t call it fun, it wasn’t as terrible as I had feared. At the end I had in my hand one small, funny-looking knitted brown thing. I held it up for inspection and decided that it looked more socklike than not. Mother seemed pleased with it. She said, “It looks just like the first one I made at your age.”
“Well, that’s that,” I said, packing up my knitting bag. “Done.”
“What do you mean, done? Where are you going?”
I looked at her, not comprehending.
“Let’s start on the next one,” Mother said.
“The next one?” I yelped. Was she crazy? It had taken me hours to make this one.
“Of course the next one, and kindly don’t raise your voice like that. What’s Jim Bowie going to do with only one sock?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to add, I don’t care. Maybe he can make a puppet out of it.
“And what about the other boys? And Father? And Grandfather?” she said.
I counted up. There were the six brothers plus Father and Granddaddy, and they had many feet amongst them. So that meant there was also tomorrow, and the day after that and the one after that. My mind reeled. There was my whole life for you, socks stretching all the way to the infinite horizon, a yawning valley of knitting tedium. I felt sick.
“Please, Mother,” I said in pathetic tones, “let me do it tomorrow. I think my eyes are strained.”
She looked so concerned at this that I realized I must have touched a nerve. Perhaps the addition of spectacles to her only daughter’s not-so-promising features didn’t bear thinking about. This was a small but handy nut of knowledge, and I stored it away for future use. Also, perhaps I could cultivate sick headaches.
“All right,” she said, “that will do for today.”
I grabbed my knitting bag and got out of there before she could think of some other homegrown skill for me to learn. I took my bag to my room and then dashed downstairs and out to the darkened laboratory, but Granddaddy wasn’t there. He was probably out collecting plants. Rainy days were a good time to collect plant specimens, which was just as well, as it was impossible to find animal or insect life, all of which melted away in the rain and stayed away until the sun came out again. I lit one of the lamps and sat in his shabby sprung armchair, contemplating the rows of glinting bottles. The lulling rain pattered overhead.
I awoke to Granddaddy hanging his dripping oilskin on a nail.
“Good afternoon, Calpurnia. Are you keeping well?”
“Yes, sir, but I’m tired out from all the knitting I had to do today.”
“And how do you like knitting?”
“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” I admitted, “but there’s such a lot of it. I’m supposed to knit socks for everyone before Christmas, and that’s a tremendous number of socks. I’m hoping you like yours plain because I haven’t learned any patterns yet.”
“I like my socks plain. I never learned any patterns either.”
“You can knit?” I asked, amazed.
“Oh, yes, and darn too. Several of the men in my regiment were accomplished knitters.”
He saw the look on my face and went on, “We had to be self-sufficient in the field. If you needed a new sock, you made it yourself. There were no wives or sisters—or granddaughters, for that matter—to look after us, and parcels from home seldom got through. I remember one sergeant writing home at Christmas, asking his wife to send him a new pair of rabbit gloves. They arrived in the middle of the following summer, and by then he’d lost two fingers to frostbite. But he kept his thumbs, so he was happy about that. There was, of course, the problem of the empty fingers in the gloves. They interfered with his rifle grip, but he lopped them off at the knuckle and sewed them flat. Made a neat job of it, if I remember.”
“Self-sufficient.” I thought about this for a while. If our soldier boys had learned to knit, if my grandfather had learned, maybe it wouldn’t kill me to learn.
He looked at me. “I imagine that your mother is hoping you learn cookery, as well. We had to cook for ourselves, too.”