After River

After River Read Free

Book: After River Read Free
Author: Donna Milner
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was not a part of who they were. I cannot imagine the strange couplings, which must have taken place through layers of nightclothes, leading to my mother giving birth to four children by the time she was twenty-six years old.
    Years later, after my father died, my mother told me–in anunusual late-night, soul-baring conversation brought on by grief and wine–that she’d never seen my father without his clothes on, and that he’d never seen her fully naked. From the way she said it I understood this was not her choice, but just the way things were with him. I was left with the image of each of them in opposite corners of the room, their backs to each other, as they changed in the dim light. I imagined my mother, behind her wardrobe door, slipping out of her printed dress and pulling a floor-length cotton nightgown over her head. And in the other corner, I envisioned my father stripping down to his woollen underwear. Longjohns. He wore them like a second skin, winter and summer; the only time he was out of them was for his infrequent baths.
    My father refused to take regular baths like the rest of us. He swore that every time he bathed he got a cold, or pneumonia. He avoided the deep, claw-foot tub that took up half of our bathroom. Every night after the evening milking we heard splashing behind the locked door as he sponge bathed at the bathroom sink. Once a month he risked death and disease and took his ritual bath. And sure enough, the next day he was hacking and coughing and swearing he would never climb back into the tub.
    Dad said he didn’t need baths; his longjohns soaked up his sweat. He had three pairs, which he rotated throughout the week. Despite his refusal to bathe, I never thought my father smelled any different from the rest of us. We all carried that same barn aroma of cow manure, sour milk, and hay. The acrid-sweet smell was everywhere, in our clothes, in the house; it was as much a part of us as the milk that was our livelihood. When other children held their noses in the schoolyard it never occurred to me that those odours, so natural to our lives, were offensive to others. I didn’t realize the truth of their taunts until the first time I returned home after being away for twoyears. I can still remember how surprised I was when I walked in the door of our old farmhouse and inhaled memories.
    But I couldn’t help notice the odours on washday. Every Saturday morning my mother and I sorted the mountains of soiled clothes and linen on the floor of the enclosed front porch. Every week two pairs of father’s longjohns ended up in a pile with my brothers’ jockey shorts and T-shirts. My brothers refused to wear longjohns except in the worst of winter. Their underwear swished around with Dad’s in the wringer washer, a grey swirl of man-and-barn smelling soup.
    Mom once told me that it was interesting what you can tell about peoples’ lives from their laundry. She knew my brothers’ secrets from the state of their clothes and the contents of their pockets. Not that she ever used it against them. She adored her boys and was only surprised when she discovered some clue that betrayed they were human after all: the tobacco leaves stuck in the lining of their pockets, broken matches, snoose plugs and gopher tails. She read stains like a private diary.
    Morgan was fifteen on the washday an unwrapped condom fell to the floor as Mom turned his jean pockets inside out for the last load. She leaned over and picked up the translucent coil of rubber. She glanced over at me with raised eyebrows as if she wondered if I knew what it was. I was twelve, old enough to have heard jokes at school and to piece it together in my own fashion. Growing up on a farm made animal mating as natural as grass growing, but human mating, well, that was another thing entirely, and certainly never spoken about out loud in our home. Still, I lifted my lip in a disgusted sneer as if I knew exactly what

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