After a while her grandmother comes out. She says they’re leaving Ron Sloane at the hospital to get sewed up, and he will be all right now. They drive back to tell Mrs. Sloane what’s happened to Ron, so she won’t worry. They sit at Mrs. Sloane’s kitchen table and Karen’s grandmother has tea and Karen has a glass of lemonade, and Mrs. Sloane cries and says thank you, and the grandmother doesn’t say you’re welcome. She only nods, a little stiffly, and says, “Don’t thank me. It isn’t me does it.”
Mrs. Sloane has a fourteen-year-old daughter with pale hair, paler than Karen’s, and pink eyes, and skin devoid of colour. She passes a plate of store cookies, and stares and stares at Karen’s grandmother as if her pink eyes are about to fall out. Mrs. Sloane doesn’t like Karen’s grandmother, although she urges her to have more tea. Neither does the white-haired daughter. Instead they are afraid of her. Their~fear is all around their bodies, little grey icy shivers, like wind blowing on a pond. They’re afraid and Karen isn’t; or not as much. She would like to touch blood too, she would like to be able to make it stop.
In the evenings, when it’s cooler, Karen and her grandmother visit the cemetery. It’s less than a mile away. At these times Karen’s grandmother puts on her dress, but Karen doesn’t have to.
They always walk, they never take the truck. They go along the gravel road beside the fences and the ditches and the dustcoated weeds, and Karen holds her grandmother’s hand. It’s the only time she does. She holds it in a new way now, feeling its stringy veins and its knobs of bone and the loose skin on it not as old but as a colour. The colour of light blue. It’s a hand with power.
The cemetery is small; the church beside it small too, and vacant. The people who used to be there have built a new church, a bigger one, out beside the main highway.
“That’s where we put the women and children, when the Fenians came,” says Karen’s grandmother. “Inside that very church.”
“What are Fenians?” says Karen. The word makes her think of a laxative, she’s heard it on the radio. Feen-a-mints.
“Trash up from the States,” says the grandmother. “Irish. They wanted war. Their eyes were bigger than their stomachs though:” She talks about this event as though it just happened the other day, but really it was a long time ago. Over seventy years.
“We’re not Irish,” says Karen.
“Not by a long shot,” says Karen’s grandmother, “though your great-grandmother was.” She herself is Scotch, partly, so Karen is part Scotch too. Part Scotch, part English, part Mennonite, and part of whatever her father was. According to her grandmother, Scotch is the best thing to be.
The cemetery is weedy, though people still come here: some of the graves are mowed. Grandmother knows where everyone’s buried, and why: a car crash at a crossroads, four dead, they’d been drinking; a man who blew himself in two with his own shotgun, everyone knew only they didn’t want to say because then it would be suicide and that was a disgrace. A lady and her baby, the baby’s grave smaller, like a tiny bedstead; another disgrace, because that baby had no real father. But “All fathers are real,” says the grandmother, “though they’re not all right:” There are angel heads on the grave—stones, urns with willow trees, stone lambs, stone flowers; real flowers too, wilting in jam jars. The grandmother’s mother and father are in here, and her two brothers. She takes Karen to look at them; she doesn’t say “their graves,” she says “them:” But mostly she wants to see Karen’s grandfather. His name is carved on his stone, and his two numbers—when he was born, and when he died.
“Maybe I should’ve sent him back to the Mennonites,” she says. “He might like to be with his own people. But most likely they wouldn’t’ve took him. Anyways, he’s best here with me.
Grandmother’s own name is carved underneath his, but her righthand date is a blank. “I had to get it fixed beforehand,” she says to Karen. “Nobody around here to do it, after. That Gloria and that Vi would probably just dump me into the ditch, save the money. They’re waiting for me to die so they can sell the farm. Or else they’d move me into that city, some hole in the ground. So I fooled them, I bought my own gravestone. I’m all set, come hell or high water.”
“I don’t want you to die,” says Karen. She doesn’t. Her grandmother is a safe place for her, although hard. Or because hard. Not shifting, nQt watery. She doesn’t change.
Her grandmother sticks out her chin. “I don’t intend to die,” she says. “Only the body dies:’ She glares at Karen; she looks almost ferocious. Her hair on top is like thistles, after they’ve gone to seed.
Did Karen love her grandmother? thinks Charis, halfway to the Island, sitting at the back of the ferry, remembering herself remembering. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Love is too simple a word for such a mixture of harsh and soft colours, of pungent tastes and rasping edges. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” her grandmother would say, and Karen would flinch, because she could picture her grandmother actually skinning one. Her grandmother went out at dawn with her .22
rifle and shot woodchucks; also rabbits, which she made into stews. She killed the chickens when they were too old to lay or just when she wanted a chicken; she chopped their heads off with an axe, on the wooden chopping block, and they ran silently around the barnyard with their necks fountaining blood and the grey smoke of their life rising up from them and the rainbow of light around them fading and then going out. Then she plucked and gutted them and singed off their pinfeathers with a candle, and after they were cooked she saved their wishbones and dried them on the windowsill. She had five there already. Karen wanted them to break one, but her grandmother said, “Have you got a wish?” and Karen couldn’t think of one. “You save these for when you need them,” said her grandmother.
Karen asks more questions now; she does more things. Her grandmother says she is toughening up. When she goes to the henhouse by herself to get the eggs, she swats at the hens if they hiss and try to peck her, and if the rooster jumps at her bare legs she kicks him; sometimes she carries a stick, to beat him off. “He’s a mean old devil,” her grandmother says. “Don’t you take anything from him. Just give him a good whack. He’ll respect you for it.”
One morning they’re eating bacon, and her grandmother says, “This here is Pinky.”
“Pinky?” says Karen. Pinky the pig is lying on her afghan where she usually is during meals, blinking with her bristlylashed eyes and hoping for scraps. “Pinky’s right here!”
“This is last year’s Pinky,” says her grandmother. “There’s a new one every year.” She looks across the table at Karen. She has a sly expression; she’s waiting to see how Karen will take it.
Karen doesn’t know what to do. She could start to cry and jump up from the table and run out of the room, which is what her mother would do and is also what she herself feels like doing. Instead she sets her fork down and takes the rubbery chewed piece of bacon out of her mouth and places it gently on her plate, and that’s the end of bacon for her, right then and there, forever.
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says her grandmother, aggrieved but with some contempt. It’s as if Karen has failed at something. “It’s only pigs. They’re cute when they’re young, smart too, but if I let them stay alive they’d get too big. They’re wild when they grow up, they’re cunning, they’d eat you, yourself. They’d gobble you up as soon as look at you!”