Read Online A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anne Szumigalski
Tags: Drama, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, omnibus, collection, Abley, Szumigalski, Governor General's Award
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multiply and not divide our sorrow.
It has been decided that the children are to choose which of the two houses the family will live in. There is no other choice, just the two. They are hesitant, even after having consulted in the back garden of Number Twenty-eight. For here is an apple tree with a short trunk springing out of the worn grass like a mushroom, its many sturdy branches all leaning to the south. Aha, the north wind, their father warns them. What do they care? A tree with enough easy branches to hold them all is a treasure, or at least an opportunity. Here they could hang like a tribe of monkeys in a cruel zoo watching their parents watching them, and behind their parents the usual row of aunts and godmothers and the two grandfathers whom fate has allotted them.
Number Thirty-two, on the other hand, has a high patch of rhubarb and an old grey shed with spaces between the boards. Inside people can look out, but outside people, however hard they peer, can see nothing in the mildewy dark but broken slats of light and the peculiar glow of unfamiliar eyes.
What decides them is Number Thirty-four – next door. This is a derelict church, a small sad building open to the sky. It has fallen rafters in the nave and long grass growing among the grainy tombstones and leaning rusty crosses. Its bell lies split among the weeds, and each of the four young minds is busy thinking of ways to mend it. One thinks glue, another rivets, a third is sure it can be welded. Put on the helmet, the welding goggles. How brilliantly shines the welder’s torch ruining the eyesight of any dog or child who might stare at it with unprotected eyes. Then boom boom dong, the great bell – they will name it Tomasina – will give tongue again. Her voice will sound once more all over the neighbourhood, waking people who would rather sleep, startling cats to claw their way up trees, and forcing birds to begin their foolish trilling before the slightest pale light is showing in the east. The grandfathers turn over in their snug sleep. Only the dead remain undisturbed beneath their humped blankets of weeds. After all they are awaiting a trumpet, not a bell.
~~~
The story has it that N once took words from women and stuffed them higgledy piggledy into the mouths of men. What could the poor fellows do? Silence was ruined for them and speech too, for before this they had much enjoyed listening behind walls and doors to the chitchat of women, their gossip and conjectures. What can a man have to say that is half as interesting as the babble of women? They were used to writing things down without saying the words aloud. Now the gruff sound of their own voices hurt their ears. And they were afraid, for hadn’t they read somewhere that spoken words are predatory wasps which lay their eggs in the orifices of a living victim. Whose child is this that gently lies egged on by his mother or his grandmother? Poor Boy could be slaughtered by the sound of speech coming from his unaccustomed mouth. Of course he won’t stay dead for good, but his resurrection will be a difficult one. It can be accomplished only with wings, gauzy and green, drying in the sunlight. Soon he will dance in the clear air, he will swoop and buzz and swoop and buzz again. Who will understand the words of his song? His sister believes, as she pushes him devotedly round the bumpy churchyard, that the future will translate his language and make it plain, plain as the broken bell and the altered psalms sung in a ring a ring-o. It is only when she vanishes, when she is lost and everyone is calling her that he learns at last to speak her name, Brythyll, a kind of fish in another tongue, his mother explains in the dark when he cannot sleep.
~~~
Nothing happened in the shed, she said afterwards, nothing at all. It was simply that he was in the shed when she went in. It was simply that they were there together, him and her, breathing in the dusk, playing spies, watching for strangers. They did
It has been decided that the children are to choose which of the two houses the family will live in. There is no other choice, just the two. They are hesitant, even after having consulted in the back garden of Number Twenty-eight. For here is an apple tree with a short trunk springing out of the worn grass like a mushroom, its many sturdy branches all leaning to the south. Aha, the north wind, their father warns them. What do they care? A tree with enough easy branches to hold them all is a treasure, or at least an opportunity. Here they could hang like a tribe of monkeys in a cruel zoo watching their parents watching them, and behind their parents the usual row of aunts and godmothers and the two grandfathers whom fate has allotted them.
Number Thirty-two, on the other hand, has a high patch of rhubarb and an old grey shed with spaces between the boards. Inside people can look out, but outside people, however hard they peer, can see nothing in the mildewy dark but broken slats of light and the peculiar glow of unfamiliar eyes.
What decides them is Number Thirty-four – next door. This is a derelict church, a small sad building open to the sky. It has fallen rafters in the nave and long grass growing among the grainy tombstones and leaning rusty crosses. Its bell lies split among the weeds, and each of the four young minds is busy thinking of ways to mend it. One thinks glue, another rivets, a third is sure it can be welded. Put on the helmet, the welding goggles. How brilliantly shines the welder’s torch ruining the eyesight of any dog or child who might stare at it with unprotected eyes. Then boom boom dong, the great bell – they will name it Tomasina – will give tongue again. Her voice will sound once more all over the neighbourhood, waking people who would rather sleep, startling cats to claw their way up trees, and forcing birds to begin their foolish trilling before the slightest pale light is showing in the east. The grandfathers turn over in their snug sleep. Only the dead remain undisturbed beneath their humped blankets of weeds. After all they are awaiting a trumpet, not a bell.
~~~
The story has it that N once took words from women and stuffed them higgledy piggledy into the mouths of men. What could the poor fellows do? Silence was ruined for them and speech too, for before this they had much enjoyed listening behind walls and doors to the chitchat of women, their gossip and conjectures. What can a man have to say that is half as interesting as the babble of women? They were used to writing things down without saying the words aloud. Now the gruff sound of their own voices hurt their ears. And they were afraid, for hadn’t they read somewhere that spoken words are predatory wasps which lay their eggs in the orifices of a living victim. Whose child is this that gently lies egged on by his mother or his grandmother? Poor Boy could be slaughtered by the sound of speech coming from his unaccustomed mouth. Of course he won’t stay dead for good, but his resurrection will be a difficult one. It can be accomplished only with wings, gauzy and green, drying in the sunlight. Soon he will dance in the clear air, he will swoop and buzz and swoop and buzz again. Who will understand the words of his song? His sister believes, as she pushes him devotedly round the bumpy churchyard, that the future will translate his language and make it plain, plain as the broken bell and the altered psalms sung in a ring a ring-o. It is only when she vanishes, when she is lost and everyone is calling her that he learns at last to speak her name, Brythyll, a kind of fish in another tongue, his mother explains in the dark when he cannot sleep.
~~~
Nothing happened in the shed, she said afterwards, nothing at all. It was simply that he was in the shed when she went in. It was simply that they were there together, him and her, breathing in the dusk, playing spies, watching for strangers. They did
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