Tara Selby Smith
Churning
"Stay still. Shut up. Don’t tell." That’s what he said down in the sugarhouse. Every time. My tongue tasting sweet pine splinters, him under my skirt.
But churning was safe. Sitting astride the churn in the cold corner of the kitchen alone pumping the dash up and down. Up and down. The satisfying flip-thud of cream turning butter.
Even now, I always buy real butter. My granddaughter came home one day with some damn low-fat spread. Well, she put it on her toast every morning of her visit and I went without. And soon’s she was gone I marched into town and got myself butter. That spread was waiting for her at the back of the fridge when she came back next summer.
"Why didn’t you use this? Or throw it out?" She crinkled up her nose at the little date printed on the top.
"I use butter," I says. "But there’s plenty left, so why would a body throw it out?"
"It’s out of date by six months!" she says.
"They put those dates on so you’ll buy more before you need it," I tell her. Folks born after the Depression need to hear this kind of thing. For their own good. I reared my children on a good healthy dose of for their own good. Not that they ever thanked me, mind you.
Esther, my next oldest sister, did the churning before I came of age. It took her a whole morning of moaning to turn out a squishy soured lump of excuse for butter. Mostly she sat peering down into the churn. Inviting the flies to go on in after her, Ma said. I never lifted the lid to check. Paddling was like sending my fingers down to work the gathering cream. I could always feel it coming.
Afterwards I’d wash it and work it good to squeeze out all the buttermilk. I’d salt it and press the bright white butter into the mold, stamping each mound with the fancy thistle design. Even Ma didn’t frown when she wrapped my butter for market. My butter was the only thing on that farm that went for something. It didn’t get eat; it got sold. For money. My butter always weighed up right. Always fetched the full price.
Ma was jealous of my cold hands for making butter and flaky pie crusts.
I know she was. But far’s I could tell her hands were the only parts of her
that weren’t cold. When Pa told me I’d make a good wife someday my insides flopped -- like butter in the churn.
My sister Beulah, the pretty one, was jealous of Ma being jealous of me. Just about ten years ago now, she died that way. Last time I saw her alive it was still stuck in her craw. "I know Ma never loved you, though." She shook her head and I fed her milkshake through a straw.
Churning wasn’t like other chores, like shoveling out the hen house or washing the men’s stinking clothes or scrubbing the floors or meeting Pa down to the sugarhouse. It was clean.
Sometimes my brother John passed through the kitchen when I was churning. John had one of those smiles that caught you up by the waist and spun you round.
"Smells mighty good, Mabel," he’d joke. He didn’t think butter churning gave off a smell. He didn’t notice that everything, and everyone, has a scent.
I wouldn’t answer, but stare down at the churn and try’s I might I never could wipe that grin off my mug when John was around. John was the only one of them all, my brothers and sisters and the hired men, who called me by my proper name.
"Maple," my brother Horace called me one day before I remember. It stuck -- like hot syrup on ice. "Make up the beds, Maple." "Fetch some wood, Maple Candy-dandy." "Time for churning, Maple Butter." The clever ones went on and on.
But not John. John showed me things. Like where to find wild strawberries in June, how to tell the time by the sun and my way by the stars, which mushrooms made good eating. He was most like Pa in his ways of knowing things. But he wasn’t like Pa at all. No, being with John was like picking the first peas in the warm July sun after a long winter.
Someway, John knew about the sugarhouse. I never liked to think how he knew. A couple times he got wind of Pa calling me down there and he put a stop to it. Only times I ever remember him and Pa having words.
But churning was safe and I looked forward to butter days. When I’d finished, though, I’d pull my skirt down far as it went towards my ankles and look down at my dirty big feet at the bottom of my legs growing too fast for a poor family with fifteen hungry mouths to cover. I see the dirt now, but I never noticed it then. So I stood there but I never had long to wait.
"Did you fetch the eggs, Maple Sugar?" Or "Call the men to supper, Maple Leaf!" Or "Go drive the cows in, Maple Tree!"
That’s where I was that night. That night that split my life in two. Out past the back pasture with Pa and two of the hired men, chasing the cows home ahead of the storm.
You could feel it coming all week, that storm. It just lay over us like a ewe heaving in labor, straining to release a gush of hot juices, the clouds thick and woolly and everything smelling wet and too-ripe. Waiting.
Pa smelled it coming over the mountain before it came. He knew it was time. His ma was Abenaki. He never knew her, and white folk brung him up to be white, but he still knew things. My ma would never hear tell of his Injun blood.
Pa was bellowing for us to run faster than a bull in season to get the cows in safe. The wind lifted my skirt and the men were behind me but for once they didn’t tease or even look. The sour taste in my stomach was the storm’s rage. Coming.
"Git to the barn!" John hollered as he streaked past on Star, bareback, clutching her mane. I waved my arms and shouted, but the wind shoved the words back down my throat.
"Goddamit!" Pa was screaming, "Run!"
The light was bright but slant, like winter in mid-summer. The sun setting in a hurry behind mountains of black clouds with tarnished silver round their edges. Pa was chasing after the cows with a horse whip. I saw the whites of his eyes as he flew by.
Fear and 150-proof, those were the two things that flipped Pa. Like two sides of a coin and you never knew which side was up. He didn’t scare easy. Once he killed a bear with a pitchfork. But the drinking – that came easy.
Out somewhere behind the sugarhouse was the still, and the border into Canada too. I smelled the stuff from those jars on Pa’s breath. Pa used to say, "Ayup, the moon shines bright over Prohibition." The men passing round the jar in the sugarhouse laughed every time he said it. I smiled, too, because as long as the men were there I was safe.
I used to think if Ma’d just allowed drinking in her house she might not have lost her husband, and lots more besides, at the bottom of a Mason jar.
But it was fear, not moonshine, that day. I wasn’t scared of the storm till I saw Pa was. All my born days I never ran so fast. My long braids like kite tails behind me, I kept on for the barn with my eyes screwed shut against the flying grit. But when I saw fire inside my eyelids I froze. Under the butternut tree, down the slope from the barn. I opened my eyes and saw Pa lurching, black in the open doorway and I thought sure the lightning’d got him. Caterwauling and crashes, thunder and wailing beat into my eardrums and I made out shadows thrashing near the barn door. But I didn’t know till the wind brought the scent my way. Scorched.
"Electricity does not smell," my late husband told me in that calm cold way he had. I was hiding under the bed during an electrical storm at the time. He looked ridiculous, peering under the bed, the lacy coverlet like a bonnet over his bald head.
No, I smelled it and I didn’t need to see what happened next. Pa holding him like the day he was born, ’cept he was swaddled in charred flesh and blood and horse shit. He carried him outside and stumbled to his knees and howled to the just-bursting clouds. My brother dark and limp, my father’s face a pale moon.
The old reverend told us the heavens were weeping that day. But they were just lashing rain on the just and the unjust -- and justice or injustice all depends on who you are.
Another angel in heaven, Ma said to the bread dough. And slammed her fist into it.
But down here. Away down here.
The body count was two. John -- and Star. The number of souls that died that day is harder to cipher.
I was under that tree. Never stand under a tree when lightning strikes. Should have been me. I could see the look in their eyes.
No, what I finally figured out was that my brother took a little piece of each one of us with him. He took that little bit of ease in Pa’s step when he’d done milking for the day. He took the swish of Ma’s skirts when she served up a meal to the men. He took baby Helen’s rhythm, banging on the cooking pot with the old wooden spoon. He took Frank’s sweet dreams. He took a lot of little things.
I guess it was fair enough, he only took what he gave. But I never thought he needed any of it and I thought he knew we did. Maybe I was just hurt he didn’t take me with him.
And it’s not that I wish I hadn’t lived my life. But most of my four score and ten years I’ve spent measuring all my befores and afters against a moment when I was thirteen.
"Go on down to the sugarhouse, girl," Pa whispered as he handed me down from the wagon after the funeral.
"But Ma needs me to lay out the food," I hissed.
"Git!" I could smell the moonshine slurring in my ear.
Nowadays I always take the grandchildren and great-grandchildren down to the home place to see how they make maple syrup. Not that they come round much, mind you. Horace and his boys run the sugaring now. He gives little tours and tastings when they’re sugaring off. He shows off his new-fangled pipes and pans. Then he takes them out to the sugarbush.
While they go find out what a maple tree looks like I stay here, in the corner, churning it all over. Again. You can do that when you get to be my age. Pa never made it to my age. Ma neither. The wood-sweet vinegar smell in the sugarhouse is sad and sick and old. But no one notices.
Some folk these days might call this kind of churning "coming to terms" or even, God forbid, "therapy." But all it is is seeing what it comes to, your living, when you’re done. You rinse it off and mold it as best you can and mark it someway as yours. Then you leave it for someone after you to wrap up. That’s all. Except I can never quite get it to weigh up right. Something’s missing.
When it’s real quiet I can hear the echo. "Stay still. Shut up. Don’t tell." I never did. Even after I was married I never did.
'Til now.
When my brother left he took the only person who knew.
I think that’s why I keep coming back. Why my life doesn’t quite weigh up. I think -- I think that’s why I brought you here too.
©2008 by Tara Selby Smith
