When I was seven or eight my cousins from Salt Lake City visited us in Maine. I remember we were playing, six of us, all different ages—me one of the youngest. We played a game that stretched out around my grandmother’s big two story, grey house. The game may have come to us, a gift, from the Utah cousins, or it may have sprung up among us all. One kid would be the mother, and four others her brood of children. The sixth got banished to the west side of the house, the side where the huge gnarled banana-apple tree grew. The mother would shout to the children to go downstairs to the basement for some apples. We who were the youngest, best suited to the role of kids, would race to what we pretended to be the cellar, hearts thudding with delight and dread, to fetch the apples. Out would spring the sixth kid, the ghost—chasing us back to our mother at the front entrance. I don’t remember how the game played itself out. I only remember playing it endlessness, and shouting “Mama, Mama, there’s a ghost downstairs!”

In the cool and musty corners of my mind are memories which tantalize like apples. Is it time to face the ghosts that guard my approach, to discover what happens when I fill my hands and run away?

…

My most special aunt had a scar which reaches the distance from her left ear, across her neck, and nearly to her other ear. It was formed of a single gash, with a series of slits running vertically along either side. The slits were about the width of watermelon seeds, balancing on their longer edges. I used to forget my manners, and find myself staring at that scar, losing myself to its menacing design. I’m not sure when I first learned the story of the scar, or from whom. I am quite sure, though, that I heard it before I let myself understand it.

It was Christmas Eve, and my grandfather, grandmother, and the four middle children who would be my uncles were just down the road at the St. Bernard’s Church evening mass. My special aunt, because she was the eldest child, was taking care of my mother and her twin—the two of them youngest—as well as a slightly older brother. In the home where I would later live with my mother and younger sister (the house by then divided into apartments by the uncle who would inherit it and lease to us), the little ones were in the same bathtub in which, years later, my sisters and I would bathe. Up the narrow stairway which rises directly from the front door came the man my aunt had spurned, his marriage to her having been arranged in the old country. A barber, he had a mean streak, once provoked. With the razor he carried for the purpose, he slashed my aunt’s neck. My uncle raced across to the church to bring home his father, the grandfather I never met.

Christmas Eve was the birthday of the mother of my Utah cousins and her twin, my own mother. They must have been one or two, there in the bathtub on the anniversary of their birth, with a frightened big sister dripping blood into their bath water. My grandfather—known to me from the restored photograph sitting by the side of my bed, out of the frame of which he stares with a fierce, handsome dignity—apparently rushed back from high mass. He took some of my grandmother’s thread and a sturdy needle—she being a seamstress, stitching the finery for the town’s well-to-do—and stitched my aunt’s neck. Those two rows of slits attest to his handiwork. He did not take her to the hospital, not wanting to expose my aunt’s foolish refusal, all for love, of the marriage he’d arranged for her.

…

Sometime around my tenth or eleventh year, my father was away for what seemed a long time. I was in a peculiar closet-like chamber affixed in a post-script sort of way, to our living room. We called it the office, apparently harkening back to some previous resident’s having been a doctor. In it were my mother’s sewing machine, the kind you worked by pumping a lever with the side of your knee, and a long, deep bureau with drawers that barely opened for the layers of paint. Up above hung a shelf with metal files full of the important family papers. Beside them lay our baby books: three fat with proud and conscientious records; mine, the fourth, dismally sparse, nearly new; and my younger sister’s, shiny, white-covered, as empty as mine. The room, long and narrow, angled off at about thirty degrees, and then continued back for two child paces. In its farthest corner stood a closet of bulky woollen coats, and metal canisters that once had been filled with potato chips for school picnics and church outings. Now they held woollen tams, scarves, white lace gloves and such, carefully labelled and fragrant with moth balls. Only the proud red King Cole insignia on the surface hinted at their former content.

I don’t know what I could have been doing in that room, or if anyone knew I was there. What I can remember is overhearing the caller at the front door, an uncle, who spoke to my mother in hushed, rapid tones while my stomach filled with dread. He left, and my mother cried, angrily brushing away her tears. That summer, we up and packed, moving into one of the apartments into which, by then, my grandparents’ home had been divided.

I must have been given some explanation, told enough to keep me plodding through the day-to-day motions of that move. But memory takes these clean breaks. I have a memory of scrubbing away the heavy cabbage smells of the slovenly woman just moved out from this apartment. And yet, I doubt that I cleaned. I probably only watched my mother clean, while I myself merely willed away the smells, the ugliness, and the anguish. Into four rooms, without even a hallway, we had to fit a life which had sprawled out over four bedrooms and three floors, back and front yards and two storey garage, swing sets and lilac bushes. And yet I do remember choosing, for my room, wallpaper out of the catalogue’s mid-pages, those with prints we could afford. I picked one with huge flowers in pastel tangerine, yellow, and lime green—gaudy enough to satisfy any eleven-year-old’s desire. Later, with all my heart I detested that wallpaper. Even now, I shut out of my life even the distant relatives of those colours.

For me, and I suspect for my mother too, they had only one redeeming aspect, those squalid, scrubbed walls at night thudding and thumping with rats that sought shelter from the alley that nudged up to our kitchen wall: the proximity to my aunt and her serene, elegant home situated just up the driveway off to the apple-side of the apartment.

…

In that lovely grey home of my aunt’s (which would wind up given to the church and torn down for land on which to build old folks apartments), forty years after her throat got cut, that uncle for the love of whom my aunt caused her family such disgrace, would lay dying. He was the only human being I ever saw die. It won’t either leave or rest within me, that image of him curled on a cot to the side of the high spindled double bed of the downstairs bedroom, emaciated, the spirit and flesh of him sucked out by cancer, emitting a half-yelping, half-mewling sound like nothing I’d ever heard.

Twenty times since, I have dreamed of his dying. In one dream, he sits in an arm chair, off behind his own recliner, my aunt in another chair, facing him. At a certain moment they reach out, gracefully synchronized, each turning off a lamp on the polished end table between them. With the pull of those finely beaded chains, the lamps go out, and my aunt and uncle die together.

Of my uncle I recall mainly his gruffness and his irritability, his refusal to speak English around us, although he spoke it perfectly well. At one end of their kitchen table my uncle would sit, soaking chunks of Italian bread in a bowl of green beans stewed in spicy tomato sauce made from the vegetables from the garden he tended. He rarely spoke. He only chewed and watched out the window which spanned the length of that table, eying the driveway and his garden plots. My aunt would dally and swish about her kitchen, refilling coffee cups, tending to him and at the same time buffering his gruffness, gracefully deflecting it. He was lean and leathery. Even while knowing I had nothing to fear, I was frightened of him.

He softened only twice that I remember. Once was before his only journey back to Italy, the birthplace he’d left at seventeen, for the opportunities of America. The quick light in his eye surprised me—his pleasure at the farewell party someone threw for him. I can see the money tree, the very idea of it funny to me; crisp new bills folded the way my daughter used to fold fans, strung on a branch in a vase. He left it sitting there for weeks, on top of the television set. The other time he softened was shortly after his retirement from the Knox County Cement Plant, where he worked from his seventeenth to his sixty-fifth year. This was the day he learned that the cough and chest pain which plagued him was lung cancer. The diagnosis seemed to cause him relief, to gentle his spirit. In the years since he died, I’ve kept on wondering: Did it comfort him merely to have the pain of his life acknowledged? Or did the diagnosis free him from a need to struggle against weakness?

The memory of my uncle’s dying mingles with that of falling in love with my future husband, then twenty-two, during the spring break we spent away from the school from which he would graduate in a couple of months and move out of my life forever—or so I feared. The night before I saw my uncle dying on that cot, my husband and I had shared a bed for the first time. The memory of our night together seemed inextricably twined with the memory of the man my aunt had nearly died for the love of. Mortality wraps itself all about our loving of one another.

…

Sometime when I was four, my mother left home for a weekend. A short time later, she would leave again for the birth of my youngest sister. This first time, though, she was taking my oldest brother to the military academy she was trusting to straighten him out enough that he might lead a decent life. My father stayed home to take care of us. At that time, my badge of distinction in the midst of my family was hair which reached nearly to my knees. My mother braided it each morning, in a special time we had shared, me perched on a stool looking out at the shoes lined up and polished, and the cereal bowls, each at its place along the counter. All my life I have felt most comfortable with braids thumping out on my back the rhythm of my pace while walking or running. Short hair has always seemed unlike me, a temporary state of looking not quite as I feel inside, the way my husband describes being bearded.

I remember that when I was young I suffered from headaches periodically. Our doctor had suggested to my mother that they might be caused by the weight of that hair. Strong though she was, she resisted the inevitable haircut, maybe needing the peace and order she could impose on a less than orderly life by braiding it each morning. Later that year another doctor, attributing the headaches to my near-sightedness, would fit thick, ugly, spangled, cat’s eye glasses to my face.

During my mother’s absence, my dad, in an uncharacteristic assertion of fatherhood, decided to take care of my headaches. Getting his daughter’s hair cut may have been the only decisive thing he ever did in all the years I remember. God only knows what motivated him. He left me at a barber shop on Main Street. I remember sitting there afraid, wanting to flee, knowing that no good would come of this. A child unused to rebellion, I sat still while the barber wrapped a plastic sheet around me and then sheared my lovely hair, even scraping my neck with a razor. Finally lifting my eyes to the mirror, I saw a gawky wide-eyed kid with one of those ridiculous cuts I later learned to call a pixie.

I still can feel the tears welling in my throat when I asked for a braid of hair. The barber mumbled how that wouldn’t be possible. But later he put into my hand a white envelope, one long brown curl in it. The memories swell and tumble. My dad, I know, took me for a treat. I faked, drinking some cloying milkshake to let him think I was fine. Later, of course, we had to go home. I don’t know how many days or weeks it was that my mother wept whenever I entered the room.

Upstairs in my aunt and uncle’s bedroom—an unfinished attic room so unlike the polished graciousness of their downstairs—my aunt would sometimes show me a dusty book so thick it no longer closed. In it lay an envelope, yellowed, with a fat light brown braid tied with a pastel ribbon of a colour I can’t exactly remember. This was the braid of my oldest cousin. I don’t know now why or when my aunt showed it to me, only that it made for a sweet and safe memory, one which gave pleasure to us both. I still wonder why my mother and I couldn’t have shared envelopes of safe, sweet memory. Instead, we share this foreboding.

…

My last, most recent memory of these years comes rising out of the driveway leading down from my aunt’s home, on that westerly, the alley-side, of what had been my grandmother’s home and now was ours. My mother, younger sister and I happened to be all three in the cramped hallway upstairs when the door which opened directly onto the street banged against the doorstop. The three of us nearly piled into each other, staring, transfixed by three versions of the same emotion. Up those stairs, chattering introductions, climbed my older sister—just returned from one of her exotic adventures out in the world, far from home.

Behind her a lanky boy followed, ascending the narrow stairway which my aunt’s vengeful fiancé had climbed, razor in hand, some fifty years before. Each step that boy climbed made the
floor drop away, lifting him further from that basement full of child ghosts and giving us our first close-up look at a long-haired male. A dark gold tooth flashed as he smiled at us. Brown locks of
hair spilled onto the shoulders of his leather jacket. It would be years before we would come to appreciate what a good, sweet man he was.

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Elizabeth Templeman grew up in Maine and now lives, works, and writes in the south-central interior of British Columbia. Publications include individual essays appearing in various journals and anthologies, and two books of essays, Notes from the Interior, and Out & Back, Family in Motion. To learn more about her, check out her website https://elizabethtempleman.trubox.ca/