Spark of Self

The world of Mary Jane's childhood was (as it is for most children) a mythic place. The real and the child's interpretation of the real combine into a story the adult spends the remainder of life deciphering. Mary Jane's world surrounded her in her family and the impact of those individuals upon one another. Laughter, tears, the inevitable sufferings of love's promises and betrayals, of nature's wounds, of the press of history (genetic and otherwise)--all swath the child. The child makes nothing of it, and makes it into everything. Creates of it everything she knows.

The world was made of leaves, ferns, Grandma's daisies, breezes and the lake. It was bordered by the spruce bog. Wildflowers grew there. "Do not go into the woods!" One wild flower led to the next. An old lady got lost, picking. Fishermen found her in water up to her waist. Three days wandering. Beyond safety--endless wilderness. 

"Don't play in the reeds!" Blood suckers and leeches swam there. They would stick to your skin. They could cover your body. The boy who swam in the reeds to save Mary Jane's beach ball lay on the grass bank screaming. All his skin squirmed with black. The grown-ups poured salt on him and the suckers fell. His skin pocked with red wounds. 

"Don't climb into the ice house!" But the ice gleamed amber in the saw-dust and the air was cool. A child could fall between the ice blocks and never be seen again. She didn't fall, but her father laid her across his knees and spanked her. You could have died. You could have died. You could have died. 

Did every beauty shimmer with danger? She held to her Grandpa Klimek's leg. Her grandma's apron is a flag in wind. Over the Gap at the end of Four Mile Bay a tornado wagged, chasing the launch to shore. Water the color of gun metal. "Please, God. Please." The funnel broke and water poured from the sky.

Since earliest years, since the beginning of memory, the world was for Mary Jane a terrifying, beautiful place in which she could not quite find her footing. Her earliest memory is a dream which she remembered from its first appearance in her mind through numerous re-plays for years until she became old enough to pray and manufacture her own additions to “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

               

"Please God,” she prayed aloud with her mother kneeling beside her at the side of the bed, “don’t let the house burn down for one hundred and sixty-six years. Amen.”

The dream prompting the prayer came when she still was young enough to be sleeping in a crib. The blanket covering her was pinned down with a gigantic safety pin, presumably so that she wouldn’t kick it off. I know this because the pin and the rungs of the crib were the first thing she saw upon awakening.

Mary Jane is standing by the side of the road in front of the lodge, looking towards the water. An orange road grader is coming down the road from my right, and it is spurting fire from its stack. She is terrified because road graders are so frightening anyway, but also because this one is headed towards the house where her mother is playing cards with her friends. It intends to burn the house down, and she is too small and too scared to stop it. She will lose her mother. Her mother will die in the fire.

NO!!

MARY JANE WOULD TAKE CARE OF HER!

It couldn't be allowed to happen.
An unspoken contract was set in place:

• That this mother must live to come when Mary Jane called, even in the middle of the night, even from the top of the ice house, even from across the room, even from the end of the dock where deep water swirled.
• That they would adventure together: to the sand ridges to pick chokecherries, to the islands where blueberries grew, down the dark road to the outhouse, to the city with its streetcars and the elevator at the Foshay Tower, to the sky with her father dipping and whirling and stalling and plummeting, the engine restarting, and climbing towards the sun, to the church where God hid in bread locked behind a golden door.
• That the mother would read to Mary Jane every single night, and sing a lullaby, and close the closet door, and kiss her face, and count her toes, and they would hold each others hearts until they woke in the morning.
• That she would teach Mary Jane to dance, to pray, to act in plays, to love the sound of words, to bake bread, to give the bread away, to be a friend, to be a daughter, to be loyal, and when the time came, to walk forward into a life of her own and she would say, "Go with my love; all I ever wanted was for you to be happy."
• That together they could dance and could be still, could laugh and then could scream,  could stand their ground or run away, could say terrifying things and follow them with words so loving as to melt their hearts, could lay their heads against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree.
• That when the mother cried out, that when she wept, that when the headaches came, that when she went to bed in the middle of the day, that when she wept, that when she wept, that when she wept…Mary Jane would hear and take the pain inside herself and carry it like her own child.
• That Mary Jane would keep the fire away.