Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

maybe twenty years old at this time but she seemed to me as old as my mother, as old as the powerful older teachers, the ladies looking after stores. Her hair was shingled, dark, pulled tight across her forehead and held with a bobby pin. Her smell was of the kitchen, and of dried sweaty cloth. There was something sooty, smoky, about her—about her skin and her hair and her clothes and her smell. None of this seemed objectionable. Who would object to Robina, who would be so foolhardy?
    We had to cross a bridge that was nothing but three logs, irregularly spaced. Robina swung her arms out, for balance. The one sleeve that was half-empty flopped like an injured wing over the water.
    Her most important story was about how she used to go tagging after her mother, who did housework, years ago, for ladies in town. At one of the houses there was an electric wringer-washer, a new contrivance then. Robina, five years old, stood on a chair to put clothes through the wringer. (Even then, I understood, she would have been unable to let anything alone, would have had to show herself boss of any process.) The wringer caught her hand, her arm. That arm ended now between the elbow and the wrist. She never showed it. She always wore a dress or a blouse with long sleeves. But it seemed to me this was not for shame; it was to increase the mystery, and importance. Sometimes on the road young children would trail after her, calling, “Robina, Robina, show us your arm!” Their calls were wistful, and full of respect. She would let them go on for a bit before she shooed them away, like chickens. She was chief of those people I have mentioned, who can turn disabilities into something enviable, mockery into tributes. I never thought of that arm except as something she had chosen, a sign of perversity and power.
    I longed to see it. I thought that it would be sawed off straight, like a log, revealing bone and muscle and blood vessels in their gristly, fibrous, intimate nakedness. I knew I had as much chance of laying eyes on that as I had of looking at the far side of the moon.
    Other stories concerned her family.
    “Duval when he was little he was up on the roof all day, he was helping them shingle. He shouldn’t’ve been up there, because he has a light skin, he has the lightest skin of all our family. Our whole family is fair, except for me and Findley, the beginning and the end. Nobody thought about how hot it would be for Duval or put a hat on him. I was the one would’ve thought, and I wasn’t home. But even if you had put a hat on him he’d’ve took it off, probably, because he thinks he’s too smart to wear a hat if the men aren’t wearing one. So after supper he laid down on the couch like to have a sleep. Then after a while he opens his eyes and says as loud as anything, Get them feathers outa my face . Well, we couldn’t see feathers. So we all wondered. Then he sits up, looks right through us, didn’t even know us. Grandma , he says, get me a drink of water. Please Grandma , he says, get me a drink of water . Grandma wasn’t there at all. She was dead. But to hear him talk you’d think she was sitting there right beside him and none of the rest of us was in the room at all or anywhere he could see.”
    “Was he having sunstroke?”
    “He was having a sight of Heaven.”
    Her voice was flat and scornful.
    About all members of her family, from Duval and Jimmy who came right after her down to Findley the five-year-old, Robina spoke with peculiar respect and severity, to let you know that nothing that happened to them, no preference or ailment or feud or habitual saying or daily adventure of theirs, was to be taken lightly. Her own importance shone through them, or theirs through her. I understood that I did not weigh much in comparison. Nevertheless I was the child of the house where Robina worked; that meant something. I was not jealous.
    As we walked through the bush we might hear nuts or pine cones dropping, at a distance, and Robina would say, “Maybe that’s Duval or Jimmy or them out shaking a tree.” Then I was somehow excited to think that we were within range of them, in the territory of their excursions and adventures. I would look forward as much as Robina did to the sight of the unpainted slightly listing house, with no shade tree near it, adrift on the weedy fields—in winter, adrift on the snow—just out of reach of the bush, like an unlucky boat on a pond. Children would come spilling out of it