Mystical Rose Read Free

want to aim just behind the foreleg, he said, sighting along his outstretched hands as if, trembling from the wine, they cradled a gun.
    The single oil lamp, hung on a nail from a low beam, flickered and died, leaving the kitchen in smoky firelight. Romantic but chilly. I could feel the wind blowing through an assortment of cracks in the walls and windows.
    I was sick of the place, sick of the constant tension of uncertainty, not knowing how much there’d be to eat or what quiet horror Daddy and Uncle Brian would get up to — one night one of themfound a rabbit cowering under a corner of the outhouse and brought it to the cleared table. They wouldn’t let it go and they wouldn’t kill it, but let it hop uncertainly up and down the bare wood, laughing every time it relieved itself. After an hour the thing just lay down, it was so tired, and Uncle Brian bashed it with a brick.
    Why can’t I go to the movies? I said loudly to Mama. Gert’s going. Everyone else is going. Why can’t I do anything except sit here in the dark? It’s not right, I said. Fifteen years old and telling my Mama right and wrong. But I knew, and so did she.
    I’d like to let you go, Rosie, but we need the money.
    But it’s my money, I said.
    You want a big-game rifle, said Uncle Brian, pouring wine. That popgun of yours won’t do the trick. A moose’d just laugh at your old buckshot loads. Now John Habemayer over the other side of Burnham Road, he’s got a proper rifle. Used to hunt a lot — you’ve seen the heads on his wall, haven’t you? I wonder if he’d let us borrow it for a few days. There’s moose in the Ganaraska Woods.
    Daddy didn’t say anything.
    It’s my money in the sugar can, I said.
    Mama frowned. It won’t cost but a quarter, I said. There’s still more than a dollar left over from my flowers.
    I remember weeding, hunched over a row of newly planted greens, digging and pulling until my back ached. Every year the same, as far back as I could remember. As soon as I was old enough to stand, I was old enough to pull weeds. Hawkweed and chickweed mostly:
quicksighted
and
assignation
. And nettle:
slander
. I thought of them as tough stinkers and evil creepers.
    And then, shuffling forward like an old woman, my back bent, I came upon an unexpected — You know the flower I mean, the whitewildflower, what’s it called, Angelica, no, dammit, I mean undammit. Why can’t I remember the name? Anyway, there it was in the middle of a row of peas, and I couldn’t bear to pull it up by the roots. So beautiful, with its white petal wings and golden face, smiling up at me, and there were a couple more nearby, crowding the shoots in the next row. I came back that evening, and carried the flowers to a bed I had dug along the border of the east field, far out of the way. The soil was thin, mostly gravel. I cleared a space for the daisies — I don’t know why I couldn’t think of the name before — and transplanted them. All that summer I collected wildflowers from among the wormeaten vegetables, and replanted them in my little garden.
    I wonder if after all that was the main attraction of it — it was mine. I’d have been twelve or thirteen, and there wasn’t much I could call my own. The miracle a few years back was a warm memory, flowers appearing like magic on our front steps, but they weren’t my flowers. Poor Mama had had half a mind to dig them up and take them back to Mr. Cuyler.
    But this was charity from the land itself, from You, I suppose, and Mama actually smiled when she saw the garden. Doesn’t that look nice, she said. She made a point of collecting samples for me, and by the end of the summer my flowers made a border all down the eastern fence — almost half a mile. I had enough of a patch to be noticed by the neighbours on that side of us, the ones related to the McAllisters.
    Mrs. McAllister mentioned to me and Mama in the summer, when our corn was being ground and we were in the parlour drinking tea and