McTavish

[Written around 2008]

 McTavish
     By Cheese Box Less Leigh

A great uncle, when he was in his teens, chopped off his hand and threw it in his mother‘s lap. His father was milking in the barn close by when he did it. Apparently, he just walked up and dropped it in her lap. He said to her that she finally had what she wanted. I know that this boy’s sister later got sent to an asylum by her husband, but I don’t know what happened to the handless boy. My grandmother told me about it. When I brought it up with the boy’s surviving brother, he claimed that it was news to him. I heard from someone else that she’d been sitting in the kitchen peeling potatoes when she saw him coming in.
My sister lived for three days. She died in the ambulance between Morris and Winnipeg. My mother had made my father promise (they lived in Rosenort, a tiny village) that he’d get her to Morris in time but it had been pouring rain for days when her water broke. The road was seven miles of greasy clay that gummed up the wheel wells. The worst, stickiest clay in Manitoba. Dad phoned uncle Bill to follow with his tractor. At McTavish the car got mired down. Always having been claustrophobic, and now hysterical, mom left the car and ran around in circles in the muddy field. It was still raining cats and dogs and the dip in the road where they were sitting had too much water for their Model A to get through. A nurse helped dad and uncle Bill carry mom upstairs to maternity, muddy as she was. She’d kept falling down in the field. Dad buried Ruth by himself in a cheese box in the back forty near Rosenort. I wonder if she would have turned out evangelical like much of my family?
When my mother was about ten, my grandfather killed the neighbour’s bull. Mother had been visiting somebody, a preteen friend, and took a shortcut going home across a large, fenced pasture. When she saw grandpa, she was at first breathless and unable to speak a word. When he heard why, he drove to where the bull was and whacked it over its head with the iron bar used to keep the barn door closed. You had to have seen my grandpa to visualize this. He had huge hands, stood six three, and was very strong, even later at 75.
My mother was stooking grain for a farmer around McTavish together with a lanky boy by the name of Charles, the son of the farmer. He wasn’t much to look at, mother said, and she was afraid of him. He grabbed her and kissed her and threw her on a pile of hay. She managed to get away from him and ran to the house. As soon as his mother saw her she said, “Were you working with Charles?”
Mom got sent to work for an uncle the winter she was 11. She resented her sisters who stayed home. Why should she have to go and not they? She came from a very large blended family of eighteen children.