Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

[Written about 2000, edited this week]

Sniggles, Again (or, Courting Gravel)

     by Doless Graveheart

“Shameful!” That’s what the Reeve said. And the Postilion. No quarter given. “We are vanquished till the ghost of the Comptons is avenged to the last man jack of us.” So saying, he lit his pipe, sucking and dragging at it with intensity and vigor and, regarding the linoleum with fierce eyes, then flung it fuming into the garbage can. From which his secretary, smiling to herself, immediately retrieved it, billowing smoke, and handed it back to him who retook it as if he’d already forgotten the incident. All this fulminating had now and always over the years in the town hall in part to do with our (that is, the Sniggles’) family. We just could not be brought into line with the customs of the times. As you can tell, the narrative upshot so far, in the first paragraph of this piece, is that men in it are insolent, indolent and uncalm, while women (represented by one individual so far) remain reliablly placid and implacably competent. 

     We must recall the temper, that is, the relative elasticity, of most fiction when it creates characters. It quickly chooses the stock female fainting one and the male hero of steady emotion and strong will. But let us not, reader of this tale (and so many other readers too), be tempted by such logic. The real is not predictable nor is it attractive in any way. As we know, outside of the world of stories, women faint and fall at times, but men do so, too, and men admire the gift of insight more than they have it. So, get on the back of the real, pick up your paddle, and turn your skiff into flows you have no power to contain or direct.

     Travel to foreign countries was prohibited by the Sniggles’ father, our father, who thought that the only real journey a person ever needed venture on was the one into the skies when the soul left the body. He proved his practice of this to us by staying home all his life without leaving his six acres for any reason whatsoever during his seventy-two year tenure of the premises. He’d call to a passing neighbour when he wanted some grocery from town. He’d  hallow to the buckboard passing by to bring twelve gauge shells, he’d pay him well. Roustabout though he was, he was also adorable.  He made clothes pins out of willow for the Sniggles’ mothers and knitted socks for himself when they became too irate at his isolation to any longer indulge him, even in these most domestic of requests and necessities. He sang us to sleep evenings from his tick in the yard. Wherever we lay, we’d hear his gentle tenor voice comforting us to sleep. 

     Father hated the thought of travel because it was a thought, not because of any physical discomfort in travel. He disliked thought itself and said so now and then. We lived sixteen miles from Wainwright near Kaleida, in the western part of the province on the escarpment, near Crystal city and Mather and villages such as Clearwater, Snowflake and Fallison. Deer grazed with the cattle in the pasture. Split, dry oak heated the house. A fiddle and a guitar hung in the parlour and sometimes stroked the night. Pride ruled us and still does. We Sniggles would never give in.

     If she ever spoke I don’t recall it. My sister Sally silently made her way through this world, clad in her own silence, unafraid of her own unspokenness, I think, when I think of it at all, and able to speak with precision, nevertheless. 

     “Go to father and ask him for the loan of a needle for this darning,” her eyes would tell me in so many words and I would go do it and always she’d thank me profusely with veiled looks and movements of her fingers. She wore dresses upon that silly frame of hers. Dresses of a blousy, summery sort, filmy but modest nevertheless. She had no libido, so if you think I was going there you are wrong. She might have been a nun for all her interest in men. Animals were another matter. Often I came into the barn to find her affectionate with cow or calf, or even chickens. She liked geese for their long necks and chickens for their bobbing, red, leathery tops, she said. She petted and made much of them and it was a sight to see her hugging King, the Percheron. 

     “This one is a male,” she would announce about a gosling and I couldn’t have told one way or another if I was paid, though to please her I tried and she shook her head and giggled. That giggling was the only sound I ever heard her mouth make, except for crying once or twice. Nevertheless, she did love animals above all things, and so men who found her pretty might as well have courted gravel for all the headway they made. She lived on the farm all my growing up years and never once left it to go to town. She, too, like father, sent for necessaries and paid handsomely for them. 

     Six boys, seven girls made up the entire set of Sniggles siblings. Mothers we had two. The first was the most liked, the second the most loved. The first cooked the best soups, and the second, who still lives in the farmhouse but from whom I am estranged, continually prepared curry of such a pungency that father and the rest of us rarely entered the house at all except to eat and then get out the moment we’d finished and to our respective work or play. 

      We took, early in the tenure of our second mother, to sleeping anywhere but in the bedrooms of the house. Sally chose the icehouse, and kept quilts in it year round, even when the thermometer made the rest of us walk around wearing just enough clothing to not seem improper. Wiener-Eldon, the youngest, figured out that a hammock tied high in a cottonwood would keep others from hearing his snores and that’s where he stayed for many years at night, even after the accident. He now lives in Minneapolis and works for a high-rise company of some sort. Wango (his nickname only) slept near the pond within the perimeter of willows in order, he claimed, for the braibling of frogs to lull him to sleep. He rolled into the water one night, about which he will not speak except to Sally, who insists that she knows the whole story. Try as I might, she will not divulge it (even to write it on paper) and giggles instead until I leave off in exasperation. 

     All the rest also slept about the farmyard, some under machinery, one in a hole dug near the back fence close to the Wellbuilt-family side of our property. The Wellbuilts family is made up entirely of females, whose only male member had mysteriously disappeared many years ago. 

     Another, Ronnie Jr., made his bed in a car without wheels. Three boys and Linda chose the henhouse attic, father slept anywhere on the perimeter of the yard where he could lay his tick flat without any part of it on sloping ground, and the rest wherever. I learned to sleep sitting up, leaning on a wall, often on the blind side of the cow barn. 

     We all grew up grateful for what we had and now get together at the farm a few times a year to relive the past. This year I’m partially responsible for meals at our annual family picnic. For me, these get togethers cause a fair degree of anxiety and have ever since the accident. How do you make Jamaican jerk, does anybody know? I can’t locate a good recipe. Meat rubbed with it must be smoked with hickory, and the sauce itself must contain a generous quantity of Scotch Bonnet peppers and allspice berries, that much I do recall.