Donna Langevin – p. 110

Mary

Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, sturdy, at five my darling daughter hates wearing dresses and brushing her short black hair. Hugging her stuffed tiger, she leaves her china dolls face down on the floor.

Dressed in patched overalls, she’s happiest making mud pies and racing her brother’s toy cars. Running his train off its tracks, she lines up his tin soldiers, bombs them with marbles and jacks.

Donning her dad’s old fedora from our costume box, she swaggers around the living room pretending to smoke his cigars; and instead of a cuddle, she prefers to have her hair mussed or play Cops and Robbers with Don.

Recalling her tomboy bravado as she cocks her Daisy cap-gun, I dread when it’s clear I’m not coming home, she’ll think she’s to blame and turn that gun on herself.

Roger Nash

A Maiden Aunt

Carrying out the ash pan every morning, before anyone else was up, the pan’s cram – a sunken fire’s deep hoar-frost of grey clinkers – became, dutifully and habitually, her empty but sifted hopes of ever marrying. Her unringed fingers curled around the pan as tightly as the worn cogs on her bicycle’s always oiled gears, knuckles clicking whenever she changed speed from uphill brush-sweeps to down. She bent her back, over the years, into a barrel hoop, to hold staves of the week together, so nothing could leak. Day after day, nose to toes, in an uninterrupted assembly line, she followed only herself to the bottom of the garden, to tip ash over uninterrupted rows of cucumbers. She made walking circularly upright both entirely ship-shape and in Bristol fashion. The last time I saw her, she gazed up while looking down at her dust-free slippers, eyes sparkling with something I’d not noticed before: a carefree, rash, spontaneous delight in doing the always dutiful and habitual. It was a rare form of excited disobedience to the iron order of chaos elsewhere around her. As though taking out the ash, were, in her words, “rather naughty.” Though only in a customary way, of course, newspapers spread around the stove with pages in a brazenly observant numerical order.

A Smoothing Iron

Her mother’s coal-fired smoothing iron serves as a rusty door-stop now. And long retired with it, the way colours looked so different back then. “A white shirt was never far off black,” she explained, opening the hatch where you dropped coal or charcoal gingerly in. “‘Whiter than white,’ what colour’s that? ‘Whiter than sooty streaks of ash’ was the colour you aimed at on shirt-fronts then.” The iron sits by the door as heavy as a shell from lost artillery in forgotten wars, ‘Ukraine 1910’ stamped on it. “You spat on it, to make sure it’s hot enough,” she smiled. “But the iron was always ready to spit right back.” A reminder that skill alone wouldn’t help, loaded to your hatch with glowing bad luck, for black to avoid a snow-white day’s bleaching and wash. “My Ma told me even angels may wear shifts not far from pitch-dark as a starless night. For even angels – like us – are never far from bad luck.

We all just need to try again.” In those days, a tall ironing-board – with flat-iron – was her crucial pulpit for smoothing and folding the wisdoms of the heart.