When Moths Break Through

I knit this sweater long ago
And think you did not like it so
Keeping it there within your chest
No matter that it fit you best.

Somehow I think it slightly queer
That all these years you held it dear
Yet never put it on to wear
Despite your wish to show you dare.

But now that forty years have gone
And nimble fingers turned to stone,
You take my sweater out with pride,
Indeed there’s little time to hide.

You think it right to speculate
When blood’s too thick to circulate,
How holes inside this sweater grew
But still, you say, it looks like new.

Those thieving moths cut through my care
Though larvae stopped but moments there
Where heart might once have been
Gathering strength to fly again.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Old, Old Lady by the Boat Works

Old, old lady in black stockings
And a warm sweater
Sitting in the hot summer sun

We wash by you with our broken motor
And you see us no more than
The blur of the newspaper
The fuzzy hum of the radio
You never got the hang of the television dial
And thought it wasn’t much good anyway,

We stifle our anger at the lousy motor
That’s holding us back from a fine run on the river

At the motor mechanic methodically checking the catalogue
At the three-day delay that eats our vacation like a waning moon

Old, old lady in black stockings
And a warm sweater
Sitting in the hot summer sun
We pass yearly and wonder if

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I may find the rest of it later. This was undoubtedly a first draft, scrawled by hand on yellow paper. The poem lacks the meticulous grammar of Virginia’s polished pieces. Nevertheless, it is evocative.]

If I Live and Nothing Happens

Lucy Tillman came to sleep
In our plunder room
After working all day for
Cousins Frank and Viola
Who had steam heat
And a refrigerator
That made ice cubes.
But Lucy preferred our house
Which she knew to be quiet at night.

Cousin Viola was volatile and Cousin Frank was
Dying of athlete’s heart,
But they gave each other no quarter
And never bothered to keep their voices down.

Lucy liked the respectable dullness
Of our fireplace, the religious coldness of
Unheated bedrooms.

Every morning when Lucy left us
To return to the luxury of her workplace, she never failed to say,
“I’ll see you tonight if I live and nothing happens.”
Nothing happened.

Cousin Frank died first,
Then Lucy, who refused medical treatment.
And volatile to the end, Viola went.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I don’t know if this is fiction or not, but the end is very mysterious. What happened to Lucy?]

Paternal Anecdote

[The following is an excerpt from a letter.]

The swingset of my youth was not so grand. It was a children’s swing mounted on a metal A-frame. I can almost remember the day my father erected it in our backyard at the way back end of the lot. My father was an exceptional craftsman—a cabinet-maker in early adulthood—and seemed to take real pleasure in building things. But he apparently couldn’t support a family that way and eventually went into business and started wearing suits to work and never seemed quite as happy. Like two of his brothers, he smoked heavily and died young. I sometimes wonder how things would have been if he’d stayed a carpenter.

The Marriage Business

[This snippet of a short story is a bit mysterious. It is undated, handwritten, and ends on a cliffhanger. At the beginning of the document, Virginia scrawled some enigmatic notes. Then she launched into the tale of a small-town minister bewildered by his social situation, ruefully relating events in retrospect. Enjoy!]

The Cow Mooeth (a play by Sid Wates)
the picnic flowers Crepe Myrtle
[???]

       Now I live in California and long ago left the ministry. I’m an orthopedic surgeon and minister to a flock of all faiths or of none. The exact word for my charge of vocation is “demitted.”

       California is a very different climate from North Carolina where I grew up and started my ministry, but there is one area slightly south of San Francisco where some of the same plants I knew way back then flourish and will forever evoke in me the bittersweet memories of my failure to become a minister, anybody’s minister. It was a comedy, fortunately a one-acter. You would know without anyone telling you that I did not see it as a comedy at the time.
       I had not been invested but a few months before I was called upon to perform a number of weddings.
       “There’s always a flurry around June,” Mrs. Stevenson, the church secretary, told me. “You’ll get a lot of invitations.”
       I had already begun to think that a new minister was a kind of local entertainment, but it was the two weeks of parties before every wedding that surprised me.
       “They want to get to know you,” Mrs. Stevenson said. “The young couple and the families, so you’re like a friend who’s marrying them.”
       I must have sounded like an idiot and believe myself the more fortunate of men in my chosen vocation.
       I had had some anxieties about living in a very small town with no [real restaurants? red vestments?] as a bachelor with no widowed mother or sister to keep house for me.
       But I had lived there six months and only once had found myself at home with no alternative but to scramble eggs for my dinner. Even then my larder was stocked with chocolate-chip cookies and caramel cake.
       Beware fudge-bearing young ladies and beware the fudge-bearing young lady who offers, indeed insists, upon teaching you to make fudge.
       When the mother of Miriam Hancock appeared in my office, Mrs. Stevenson had warned me she would be coming, to talk about her daughter’s plans to be married and the desire of the family that I perform the ceremony. I was unprepared to be chained.
       I was the proverbial bird chained to its perch from the first moment she held out her hand and said in the most cordial, natural way, “If any of my girls had been boys”—there was the tiniest coloring of cheek at this—“I would have so wanted to have him go into the ministry.”
       I must have beamed in full appreciation of the compliment she had paid me. My spirits were lifted, and I felt positively elated.
       After we had agreed on a date and a few details—Mrs. Stevenson kept a checklist for the bride and groom and a carbon copy for the mother of the bride—Mrs. Hancock rose to leave and once again extended her hand, “We’ll know one another a bit better after this is all over.”
       That was the understatement of the year.

[Undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Wedding photos below via George Eastman House: 1 & 2.]

Long Pants in the Sunset

[The following is an undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann, which I suspect is loosely based on her own life, and particularly that of her husband. The plot meanders, surprisingly and beautifully, through soft memories of rural life. The portrait of “Frank’s Dad” is especially touching. Anyway, enjoy!]

          Cousin Jack, always good for a laugh, chuckled as he told the story. “We had a pig house with a stained glass roof. It came from that old church Frank’s Dad bought from the Baptists. That was wonderful lumber, bound to have been.”
          “What happened to it after you moved off the farm?” Frank’s wife Elizabeth wanted to know. She collected beautiful things and the possibility of rescuing the stained glass window from a pig house was intriguing. She remembered something about stained glass from years ago when Frank’s Dad was still living, a reference she had not understood at the time but was too busy with a baby and new house to worry about. Frank had said, “Oh, forget it. Who cares about stained glass?”
          Now, she could see Frank’s whole body go rigid. He considered her rush for beautiful but useless things eccentric, unlovable.
          Cousin Jack shrugged, “Who knows? We were so damn glad to move into town. Personally, I couldn’t forget slopping pigs fast enough.”
          Frank shook his head. Morosely. His Dad had never raised pigs, had advised Uncle Bob not to, too prone to disease; but he wasn’t one to jaw off about some other farmer’s business, especially not his sister’s husband.
          Elizabeth could see Frank didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking and was slipping into a mudpuddle and soon would fall into a quagmire from which he would descend to a weeklong pit of black mood. How could he and the ebullient Jack be first cousins: the high-powered lawyer with stubborn insomnia and bitten-to-the-quick fingernails and the once bankrupt, twice divorced (though now happily remarried) former shoe store owner (ruined by the competition who gave Green Stamps) at last making a splendid living from wind, hail, and tornado insurance.
          “It fell into my lap literally,” Jack explained. More than once. “God did all the advertising for me. I never spent a penny taking out ads and my phone started ringing off the hook.”
          “Right,” Frank said. Like selling earthquake insurance after a big one.”
          Elizabeth and Cousin Jack got on well together, although it was Frank who wanted Jack to visit. “We grew up together. Same age. Before they moved to town their farm was next to ours. Uncle Bob wasn’t much of a farmer and they were very hard up. I was embarrassed at Christmas when I got more presents than Jack. I didn’t tell him what all I got.”
          Frank looked at this moment of revelation, Elizabeth thought, like a dying man who had fought a duel on some point of honor. His mother said to her when they were newlyweds, “He’s sensitive, more than you, Elizabeth.”
          Jack was still going on about the church. “Your Dad never gave an inch. That bunch, those foot-washing Baptists, wanted it both ways.”
          “‘Mealy mouthed’, he called them,” Frank said. “He hated that. Hypocrites.”
          “He was the original tell-it-like-it-is,” Jack laughed. “Your Dad was a kick in the pants.”
          Elizabeth wanted the whole story, how the Baptist deacons came to the summer kitchen and offered to buy the church back on the same day that the crew arrived to start taking it apart. Somehow it had not dawned on the deacons when they made the deal that Frank’s father was going to use the lumber to build his own house that he, heathen that he was, and his family, not so heathen, would live in. The very boards that had been consecrated would become bedroom floors, hallways, whatever. The baptistery would be used for a bathtub or to water the horses. They could just imagine that, would not put it past him.
          “Sacrilege is what they thought,” Frank said.
          Jack hooted, “Lord, yes, the old hypocrites.” He cleared his throat suggestively.
          “What had they imagined he wanted the church for?” Elizabeth asked.
          “God only knows,” Jack said. “They needed the money so bad they had to sell and nobody else even came close to your Dad’s offer. In fact, I heard he was the only bidder. They had sold the land already, but only if they removed the church first.”
          Frank chimed in, “The congregation was like the rest of us, not well off. Poor as church mice.” He grinned at Jack. “They owed the minister and he had a family to feed and they couldn’t pay the fire insurance on the building and who knows what else. They were at risk to lose their last remaining asset. Selling the building was going to clear the decks and those who wanted to could join the church in town and maybe bring a small gift with them. It definitely made good business sense.”
          Jack hooted again. “‘It was God’s will,’ the minister said. Lord knows he wanted to sell. He only preached there every third Sunday, but still he deserved to get paid. He buried a lot of people and married a few. Funny thing about that preacher. He loved horses. Poor as he was, always kept a nice riding horse. That’s why he didn’t even try to get a city church.”
          Frank said, “He could have sold that horse to feed his children.”
          “Would have broke his heart, you know that Frank,” Jack said. “Nobody in the church wanted him to give up his horse. He’d a sooner sold off one of his children.”
          Elizabeth jumped. “I hope you don’t mean that.” Just when she thought she preferred happy-go-lucky Jack to gloomy Frank, he came out with something horrible, disguised as a joke.
          “Sure as Hell do,” Jack said. We’re talking old times here. He had five girls, you know.”
          Elizabeth swallowed hard. She knew if she looked at him straight he would be smiling, waiting to see if he had pushed her buttons. God knows men never quit. She could fight back, which he would love, or she could cave. “Did you ever go to that church, Frank?”
          Jack answered for them both, “Not hardly. Presbyterians and Baptists don’t mix, especially United Presbyterians.”
          Frank brightened for a moment. “I played my trombone there once. It’s how I got my first long pants. Mother wanted me to play at the Woman’s Club meeting, which was held at the church on a Saturday, and I said I would play only if she would buy me a pair of long pants. I was still wearing kickers for dress-up. We had overalls for school, but knickers… How I hated knickers.”
          Jack laughed, “Worse than knickers was the long stockings we had to wear.”
          “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Frank went into a deep silence, thinking about his trombone. Did he still remember the positions? Did he even have the breath to play if he did remember? The trombone would have burned up in the fire except he had left it at Jack’s house on Friday because snow was starting to fall and he was cutting across the field in time to do chores before it started up hard. Had Elizabeth got rid of it when they moved to the new house?
          “Come on, Jack,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s take a walk. That’s what they do in Jane Austen, walk among the shrubbery.”
          Frank leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He wanted to remember… He wanted to feel again the pain and suffering when his mother said, “Play Easter Parade, son, so I can cry a little.” That was the last time she visited, after his Dad died suddenly of a heart attack, his cigarette still burning between his fingers. Elizabeth was still nettled over his mother saying that about wanting to cry when he played Easter Parade. “She could not understand or rather,” she said, “she did understand.” That’s what horrified her.

*************************

          When they were undressing for bed, Elizabeth asked again about the window. “How did it happen that Jack’s family got the stained glass window for their pig pen? Didn’t your folks want it?”
          “I can’t remember anything about the stained glass window. Maybe Jack made the whole thing up. There probably wasn’t any stained glass window. I don’t remember. That church was dirt poor. Where would they have got the money? They probably didn’t believe in stained glass. Graven images, you know. Or maybe you don’t know.” Elizabeth with her Ph.D. in 19th Century Literature was illiterate in many ways. His mother had never truly forgiven him for marrying a Unitarian. Talking about the stained glass brought back all that sadness about the fire, as if he hadn’t worries enough without the house burning down.
          “David lost his drum set. My dog Hoover died. Mother’s furniture her father gave her for a wedding present was gone entirely. We spent the night with Uncle Bob and Aunt Winnie. I slept with Jack in the room with Bob Jr. and Donald.”
          He had always felt sorry for the delegation of foot-washing Baptists. They’d not had a Dutchman’s chance against his father. He could feel himself falling down the well, remembering the looks on their faces. His mother wasn’t going to help them either. It was the first time he saw what she was really like, how tough she was. Even if he could have helped, they would have despised help from a twelve-year-old boy.
          But what choice did his father have? They couldn’t live in the summer kitchen forever, certainly not through another winter. They’d only made it as well as they had because most of the winter was over when the house burned. They had been in town doing their Saturday shopping and when they got back home everything was gone. It was still smoldering with Uncle Bob and Aunt Winnie standing there crying and moaning. They felt worse than anybody because they saw the fire when it first lit up the sky, but there was nothing they could do to put it out. The acetylene gas lights were like torches in every room.
          When he saw the delegation of Baptists coming down the road he had wanted to head them off and save them the humiliation they were going to experience at the hands of his father. He knew how it was going to go, and it did go exactly as he supposed it would.
          His father stood there at the door of the summer kitchen and said, “I can’t.” He was not an imposing figure. Until he was married, he had thought of being a jockey. He was almost the right size and he had the temperament to win every race, to go for every advantage. He knew that about himself, he said when he was showing Frank how to use a crop on his pony.
          He looked at all those Baptists and he didn’t say, “Sorry, I can’t” or explain how awful it was trying to live in the summer kitchen, how miserable his wife was without the beautiful furniture her father had given her for a wedding present, how his older boy had lost his drum set and how his younger boy Frank had lost his dog Hoover. He didn’t throw in that it was Hell them all jammed together in the summer kitchen so that he and the wife were behind one curtain and her old maid sister was behind another, the boy behind another, the older boy staying in town to go to high school. He never pled to be understood.
          Every time they made their offer to buy back the church, he shook his head and said, “I can’t do it.” He didn’t invite them inside either. Steel, he was like steel when he wanted to be.
          Later his mother said, “I suppose they wanted you to let them pay you back over time since everybody knows they’ve already spent the money or most of it.”
          “We didn’t get that far,” his father said. “No use to lead them on.”
          Frank wanted to scream at him. “Why didn’t you give them a sporting chance?” He didn’t though. He knew enough not to, but he went to bed with a sick headache.
          “A bunch of mealy mouths,” his father said and Frank wanted to laugh then, but he knew not to do that either.
          Sorry as he was for the Baptists, he couldn’t wait to get out of the summer kitchen. The only way it was at all bearable was that he could sleep over at Jack’s house on the weekends.
          When they went to buy new clothes (the store opened up for them that Sunday) he made sure he got all long pants. No more knickers ever again and no corduroy. He hated the feel of it and the noise it made when his legs rubbed together. His mother didn’t have the energy to argue with him. “Let him have what he wants,” Dad said. “He’s near grown.”

*************************

          Elizabeth remembered Frank’s father coming with Mother Millicent to visit them when they had barely moved into their brand new house. Frank made a list of things to keep him busy. Trees to plant. Touch-up jobs where the movers had scraped off the paint. “He has to have something to do or he’ll go crazy.”
          What was it that gave her the idea that Frank did not want her to like his father? But she did like him, from the first, even though Frank warned her, “He’s nothing like me. We got along because I never crossed him, but he can be crude. Dirt farming is dirt farming. No bones about it.”
          All her ideas about hygiene and good manners vanished. The first thing he said, to test her she supposed, was he didn’t believe all that crap about germs; and she was sure he purposely didn’t wash his hands after working in the garden. When he needed to blow his nose he stood outside in the yard and held his thumb and forefinger above his nostrils while he blew hard. She knew she looked stunned but couldn’t help it.
          “Learned to do that out plowing,” he said, not looking sheepish or saying, “I left my handkerchief in my other pants.”
          But more than Mother Millicent he helped with the children, rocked the baby to sleep, complimented her cooking. One day when she was feeding the baby, he sat with her and told her the most awful dirty joke she had heard since college, something gross about lighting up after being plugged in. He watched her expression and when she laughed at the punch line he winked. Was he paying her some kind of compliment or was it a challenge for her to turn her back on him? Why?
          No wonder Frank was a mess. A sweet-as-pie mother and a bastard for a father. He had her in a bind. If she didn’t laugh at his jokes, she would be a stupid snob.
          His greatest compliment for her, however, came through Frank who reported that his father said when he had taken the two of them to his office and they were discussing all the ins and outs of getting organized in a new house, “Elizabeth hides work.”
          That was the supreme compliment, Frank explained. “If you wanted a letter of recommendation from one farmer to another and you said that about a hired hand, it would be like giving him an A+.”
          She wondered why he said that to Frank but not to her. She became self-conscious and wondered how it was she “hid work.” She began to watch herself and lost her rhythm.
          The last day they were there, she was holding Frank Jr., standing with Frank’s Dad by the garage waiting for Frank and his mother to come out with her suitcase.
          Inside the Mother was pressing a $100 bill into Frank’s hand. “I want you to have a nice suit, son, for when you’ll need it. Dark blue would be nice. You wouldn’t wear a black suit all that much, not enough to get the good of it.”
          Frank took the bill. No way could he refuse. She wasn’t thinking of Dad going first. That never occurred to her. Or she was thinking that the good dark suit would do double duty.
          “It makes me happy to know you’ll look nice when the time comes.”
          “Let me close your suitcase.” God in heaven, am I a good son? Am I a good son?
          “I didn’t wear half the dresses I brought.”
          “Sorry, I couldn’t get off work more to take you places.”
          “I understand, son.”

*************************

          Dad was smoking like a smokestack. Elizabeth held the baby away from it as much as possible. “They’re taking a long time over luggage.”
          “Milly wanted to give him some money to buy a new suit. He’s got plenty of suits. I can see that all right.” He spit on the pavement and ground out his cigarette.
          Elizabeth wondered what that was about? Later when Frank explained it and showed her the bill, he laughed first and then they both exploded and fell on the bed laughing in each other’s arms. It had been a long visit.
          Dad held his arms out for Frank Jr. “Come to your grandad, little guy.”
          The baby smiled at his Grandfather and snuggled into his arms, grabbed his bolo tie and sucked on it.
          Dad pushed the baby’s hair back and stroked his cowlick. Frank had had one when they first met before it disappeared when he started getting bald. “Your daddy is a good fellow, but he’s not Jesus Christ.” He turned to Elizabeth, “She wanted me to keep the stained glass, put it in the living room, but I told Bob to take it and use it in his pig house. Bob was too educated. And he was lucky. Roosevelt came in and he got the Postmaster job. It was steady. He had beautiful handwriting.”
          Elizabeth imagined stained glass in the living room, the western light coming through and hitting Frank’s trombone while his mother played the piano accompaniment to Red Sails in the Sunset.
          Frank was wearing tweed knickers with a matching Norfolk jacket and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked straight back. There was a picture to prove it. All the relatives gave back their pictures after the fire. There were more than you could have imagined, but none of Frank’s father. There were several of Frank and his mother, taken when Frank was about eleven by an artistic type photographer, a kind of misty look to the features, the way you might dream somebody looks, not the way they actually look in real life.

*************************

          Before Jack left tomorrow she would take a picture of him and Frank, full length; and she would try to get Jack to describe the stained glass. Was there a picture of a Bible story, a miracle perhaps, or just a pattern of colored glass? She devoutly hoped the latter.

Dying in California

The blossoms begin in February:
Almond turns white as brides,
And Quince blots red against wood,
Violets arise from the cold earth,
Hyacinth cannot hold back its head.

Your fight against this alien corn
Where February feels like spring
Is almost over now:
You rest uneasy on your bed.

I remember trudging across
The lower garden plot,
Past the pear trees and wild
Persimmon's despised fruit,
Entering the woods noisily and
Laughing at the snake's quick slither.

Lifting the carpet of needles
We dug deep into the woods' floor
Filling pail after pail with sweet decay
To feed Mr. Lincoln, dear Helen Traubel,
Queen Elizabeth, Razzle-Dazzle and Peace,
The children of your retirement years.

Those happy times of planting
Bring you back to life but what I can't
Forget is how you felt to wake one day
To find your brother's footsteps in new
Snow and how you always wished you'd
Cooked his breakfast or waked
At least in time to say goodbye.

Now you would shout for quiet
If only you could speak again
In this noisy room where soon you leave
The deaf, the blind, those without mind,
A roommate who chooses to speak Portuguese.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Note scribbled beside the second-to-last stanza: "going to enlist in the Navy and".]