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Carolyn Wall
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2789 words

Mabel, Gathering Wisdom

By Carolyn D. Wall

 

When she was eighteen, and too old to marry according to the custom of her tribe, Mabel Arizona climbed to the highest place on the dry plain and spread herself face down on the quartz rock. She opened her arms to the Great Spirit who never listened to words, anyway, but saw into her soul, and read the feelings she kept hidden there.

She called the spirit Simon. With the rock pulsing beneath her, Simon entered her body through the pores of her dark skin, and her brain through the follicles of her hair. She offered thanks to Him with her lips pressed to the warm rock and knew that she had only to think a thing was so, and it would be. When the sun slid exhausted toward the desert, Mabel climbed down from the rock and washed her cotton underwear in the thin stream, and she waited.

It was nearly sunset when Leonard Greely rode into camp, tall and thin with hair like syrup in the last of the sun and his glasses riding high on his nose. Leonard took Mabel’s hand, led her into the cornfield and laid her down among the thick stalks. There he gave her the first child.

Because the other Ute women would not speak to her, Mabel married Leonard in the First Baptist Church on Highway 9. To celebrate their marriage, he gave her a small silver box filled with red beans, wrapped in pale blue paper. He built her a hut and bought her a shovel so she could dig a patch for potatoes and another for squash. Before long, there were nine more sons, filling the hut whose renovated dimensions were as ever-changing as the shape of Mabel’s breasts. Meanwhile, Simon raced through Mabel’s blood, triumphant in her heart and shining in her black eyes.

Although Leonard’s house squatted on the edge of the reservation, it was the center of the tribal wheel, for Simon told Mabel all kinds of things -- whose son would bring down the season’s first deer, which baby would be born dead.

Day after day, Leonard sweated with a road crew that paved its way across the tallgrass land. On Saturdays he brought Mabel his paycheck, and he gave the bit of paper to her with a soft kiss on her weathering cheek and a new crick in his back. She gave him nothing in return. And now, she was sixty-one.

Having been born in a year that contained an extra day of winter, Mabel measured all things in leapyears. There had been two of them since her sons left home -- four to live in brick houses in Lincoln, four to make their fortunes along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Two had merely driven away in sandals and rusty pickup trucks.

Now Leonard’s back was as twisted as a hemlock branch so that it sounded like stones rubbing together when he got in and out of bed. Mabel stewed mutton, mixed it with eucalyptus and rubbed his shoulders, and nightly she thanked Simon in advance for easing her husband’s pain. While she waited for Him to actually do it, the last snow melted and the prairie grass greened and grew tall overnight. It had been a wonder to Mabel, through all the years, that most of the beautiful things seemed to happen overnight.

“Perhaps,” she said one morning while she was sorting beans for supper, “perhaps, old man, you’re too far along in years to be paving roads.”

Leonard looked at her over his glasses that no longer stayed high on his nose but were wired at the ear like a gate to its post. “That’s a subject best left untouched,” he said. “When I die, I’ll fall face down on the yellow stripes I painted that day.”

“If I die first, you will come right behind me, dead from starvation and wearing dirty clothes.” Mabel hitched herself up in her chair. “And a good thing that will be, because one day later, and you would not be able to get up from your bench for the cobwebs that would embrace you.”

“Listen to you.” Leonard eased himself from the straight-backed chair. He took down a string of sausages for her from the larder. “Is this how you talk with the other women? Would the prairie not be itself without the yakking of Mabel Greely?

He was teasing her, and Mabel smiled. She sliced the pork with an important hand and dropped it in the beanpot. Went to work on an onion. “Never mind, old man. In those first years, I grew terribly tired of hearing my own voice -- and answering myself.”

“I know.” Leonard came around the table. “I should have married you first and made love to you second.”

“Wrong.” She looked at him. “I would not have it any other way.”

And it was a truth. In all the years -- divided, of course, by four -- she had not wanted for Leonard’s gentleness, his stroking hands. Even the lines in his face had rearranged themselves to match her own. But she had never been able to take Leonard’s hands to the bank; nor would the grocer receipt the lines in her face as down payment on twenty pounds of ground beef. “And still,” she said, “I have given you nothing.”

“Say what?” Leonard said.

“Nothing, old man. Get out of here, get into that busted up jeep of yours and go line the highways.”

“The road is nothing without my lines.”

“Yes, yes, now go on with you.”

From the doorway she watched him crank the Jeep until it backfired and burst down the road like a frightened prairie dog. Then she went out to the grassland, where the blossoms tickled her face and the wind lifted her long hair that had paled to the color of ashes.

She held her arms to the sky. “Ten thousand thank you’s, Simon,” she called out, “for the strength of the trees that they can give me their branches without remorse.” And she bent to gather a few hickory limbs, a crook of willow, a twist of sycamore. She was wandering the lowland, gathering sticks and dividing her troubles by fours when Raven’s Tongue limped across the field. Half Ute and half Algonquin, Raven’s face was truly a map of the world’s rivers and plains.

Mabel’s friend spread herself on a rock, with her skirts around her. “You are praying out loud again, Mabel,” she said. “Always collecting your twigs and praying. Why don’t you come and stitch with us, or weave? Or laugh with us at the peddlers and hitchhikers who pass through with britches stretched across their rumps and fire in their eyes for the young girls?”

“I’m not interested,” said Mabel. “Yesterday my sticks bought potatoes and seed corn for the new planting. And anyway, Simon and I have much on our minds.”

“Ah. This Simon of yours. It is bad manners, Mabel Greely, to call the Great Spirit by this nickname.”

Mabel added a length of dead cedar. “Nonsense. I call him Stars and Moon and Wind in My Hair. And Thoughts in the Night, and Words to Music.”

“But why Simon?” Raven’s Tongue’s eyes were traveling the horizon, watching for the next piece of meat for the jaws of gossip.

“Do you not remember the game of Simon Says?”

Raven’s Tongue snorted. “And what does Simon say to you today?”

“He says Leonard should have a rocking chair.”

Raven turned the silver ring on her finger. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake. You are wasting the Great Spirit’s time and testing his patience.”

But Mabel’s eyes were on Raven’s ring. “He does not test me,” she said, “and I do not test Him. It is only that I have no wood and hammer and nails with which to make a chair.”

“Then go and buy one. Take Leonard’s Jeep tomorrow, and drive to Collinsville, to Mr. Klee’s Pawn Shop. There is a rocking chair in the window, there.”

“You are not listening,” Mabel said. “I also have no dollars with which to buy it. I have nothing.”

Raven’s Tongue looked toward her hut that squatted in the grassy distance. “Then come to the village, and watch the silly girls with their painted faces and their leather skirts.”

“They do have pretty faces -- and legs like carved hickory. If I had such legs--” Mabel closed her mouth, placed her boot on a twist of elm and snapped it.

“If this familiar God gives you whatever you ask for, old woman, why don’t you ask him to fix this crooked foot of mine?”

“Because it is not my foot. I cannot ask Simon to interfere in your life -- if you are not ready.”

“I am not ready?” Raven’s eyes opened wide. “I am sixty-three next month. How can you say that?”

Mabel took a length of string from her pocket and bound up the sticks. “If you were ready for Simon’s help,” she said, “you would get it yourself.”

Raven rose from her rock and stumped away through the grass. Over her shoulder she shouted, “Then Leonard should ask for his own rocking chair!”

Mabel lifted her face to a new west wind, covered her head with her shawl. “What do you think, Simon?” she said. “Are there enough strong sticks in this field to build my husband a chair? Or to sell for a quarter a bundle in the village instead of a dime?”

The wind sighed softly without so much as an answer.

Mabel did not understand. Simon had delivered her ten healthy sons because she had lifted her gratitude to Him in advance, before they were born. Still, she had never asked for an object – not for a pair of shoes or a pretty comb. Perhaps that was why He did not simply plant a rocking chair in the dooryard of Leonard Greely’s hut.

When darkness crept into its private corners, Mabel sat on her bench by the fire and watched the light rearrange her husband’s face. Soft oranges and reds smoothed the creases and the years. She pulled her shawl tight. She would wait until he went to bed and turned once or twice into deeper sleep. Then she would take her shovel and pot holes in her freshly turned earth.

When Leonard snored softly beneath the quilt, Mabel slipped on his workman’s coat and crept out to the garden. By the light of the moon, she dropped cut potatoes into the holes, covered them with her hoe and stepped them off. Each tread of her boots packed down the earth and drove the russets into their secret sprouting places. She sat down on a stump to count on her fingers the weeks until the first green curls would emerge and the yellow blossoms would wither and die. Even divided by four, it was more days than Leonard should wait, for each day bent him more like the limb of an apple tree. Perhaps in her heart, she was afraid he would snap.

Maybe she could borrow the money from one of her sons. From one of her precious children for whom she had traded bundles of sticks for rice and flour -- for apples or a rasher of bacon on days of celebration and a handful of powdered chocolate in times of trouble. But that would be borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

In all these years, she had kept nothing for herself except the silver box Leonard had given her on the day he had vowed to accompany her through sickness and health. It had been a strange ceremony in a strange place, and yet it had felt right. She had promised to love and honor this man with yellow paint on his hands and squinty lines around his eyes from looking into the distance and seeing only more road to be painted.

“So, Simon,” she said, smiling. “You expect me to furnish my own answer. And what’s more, perhaps I have found answers before.”

Before Leonard woke, Mabel filched the keys from his pants pocket, coaxed the first cough of the morning from the jeep, and drove to town.

In the courthouse square, Mr. Klee was rolling up the awning over his pawnshop. She parked at the curb and sat collecting thoughts about the ladder-backed rocker in his big window. Then she climbed down from her seat and went in beneath the tinkling bell. She did not touch the long glass cases where Mr. Klee displayed other people’s treasures that had flown in the face of a need for money.

Had he given his customers enough dollars to pay the light bill or buy new eyeglasses, or a pint of something to ease the teeth from one of life’s bites?

“Mr. Klee,” she said, “I am Mabel Arizona Greely.”

Klee’s belly hung over his belt. He hitched at one or the other and spread a smile like butter across his face.

“Yes, yes,” he said.

“I am in need of that chair in your window.”

“It is one hundred and thirty dollars,” he said.

Mabel pursed her lips. “The sign says ninety-nine.”

“The price has just gone up. This very morning, and I haven’t had time to change the sign.”

“I think,” said Mabel, “that if I have the money, you must sell it to me as you advertise it this moment -- or I will fetch that policeman who just drove past and who also saw the sign.”

“Uh-huh.” Mr. Klee’s tongue crept out to lick away his smile. “And do you have ninety-nine dollars?”

“I would not have come,” Mabel said, “if I did not have something of equal value.”

She took the bundle from her pocket and unwrapped the square of wool.

The blue paper had long ago gone to dust, and the silver box itself had mottled and darkened, but Mr. Klee was not a fool. His lips came together like pork sausages. “Oh, this is not worth much,” he said.

“I am aware of the price of silver,” she lied. “You cannot fool me.”

“Ah, an astute woman.” Mr. Klee said. He picked up the wedding box and turned it over. Pebbles tumbled out, clattering on the glass counter. “And what are these?”

“Why, they’re red beans, Mr. Klee!”

“Really. They have petrified and are useless. And, anyway, I do not buy beans.”

Mabel laughed. “You would have petrified, too, if you’d been trapped in a little box for – ten leapyears.”

Lines appeared between Klee’s eyes, and he gave another tug to his pants. “A waste of good food,” he said. “You should have cooked them.”

“I did not cook them,” Mabel said slowly, “because I never needed them.” The little shop did not seem as dark as it had. “Nor did I need more barley for soup, nor salt, nor shoes for my children. My Leonard gave us all those things. And I--”

Klee had already lost interest.

“And I--” Mabel looked at the sparkling rings beneath the glass, at the gold watches and leather wallets, the silver hair clips. “I gave my Leonard potatoes and onions, and a knitted cap each winter. And a quilt for his bed.”

Worry lines came to Klee’s face. “Don’t forget this husband needs my chair--”

“And I have cooked for him his favorite oxtail soup. I gave him a rub on his aching shoulders. I have wished him my best good mornings and my quietest good nights. My sticks have built a fire that warms him. And yes, Mr. Klee, I will give him the chair in the window.”

Klee took a length of rope and hurried out to lift the rocker into the Jeep. Mabel watched him and laughed. If this pork chop of a man had gotten the better of the deal, it was all right with her. She laid her hands on the glass counter, and Simon blessed the silver box and all its neighbors.

“Amen,” she said.

Mabel drove the Jeep and the gently rocking chair out onto the prairie where Leonard waited for her in the dooryard of the hut.

“It’s for you,” she said.

His blue eyes were quick and bright and watering in the morning light. She held out the stolen keys, but he reached for her hand.

“What?” she said. “Where are you taking me? I cannot play games, I have bread to bake and important things to do--”

“In awhile,” Leonard said. “In awhile you can gather your sticks, old woman, while I rock in my chair.”

And he led her gently through the tallgrass to the last dried stalks of the cornfield.

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