Peeling the Onion (Poem Version)

The story in this poem was placed in my collection, An Expectation of Presences, as a short story. It was put there, in effect, to "mark the place" where a narrative poem would be. It has taken years to put all the pieces together, and to be able to present my grandmother's "confession."

i

Summer of my fifteenth year, grandmother
spoke of the grown-up things, her secrets.
A little I knew from her mother, half-deaf
Cristina Butler, coal-stove memories
of Alsatian parents fleeing Prussians,
a grandfather who had served Napoleon
as waterboy in one of his campaigns.
The Emperor loved his men of Alsace
those who “spoke German but sabred in French.”
Things hidden in cubbyholes came down, things
my grandparents would inherit and carry on:
something in tarnished silver whose purpose
we never understood, a never-read Bible
from the Philadelphia Lutherans, and wine,
Passover wine long turned to vinegar.
There once had been a barn, long since burned down,
and you could see how far the garden had gone
when there were still men to do the tending.

But these were passed-on secrets, dimly-known.
Today grandmother Florence told me of Butler,
her father Albert, who robbed the town bank,
got thirty dollars for his trouble, caught
within hours. She showed me his photograph,
a stout man in coat and tie, Masonic pin
proudly displayed.”Dear Florence,” the obverse
said in pencil script, “the photos we took
together did not come out. Good-bye from your Pa.”
“And I never saw him again,” she said.
“He went to jail. No one know where he went
when he got out. Too shamed to be seen here.
I was left alone with my mother Cristina.”

But what about Homer, then?” I asked. She frowned.
Homer, the old man who had lived with Cristina
up to his death when I was eleven.
Cigar-smoking recluse called “boarder” sometimes,
others said they were “secretly married.”
We were told to include “Grandma Butler
and Homer” right after Grandma and Pap-Pap
in “Now I lay me down to sleep,” that nightmare
prayer that threatened death by suffocation.

“Homer came later,” grandmother told me.
“Nobody liked him, but he kept things safe.
We had bad years, what with the war, and then
the worst of the Depression. Nobody
had to eat except what you grew yourself.”
She wiped her eyes; she was peeling onions.
Her wide peasant face, pock-marked and plain,
the face of every German village,
bent downward over her task, the skins and roots
of onions falling into the bucket
where all the waste and slops accumulate.

She held one up, pointed her knife at it.
“The truth is like this here onion.” she said.
I jumped to hear her use a simile.
I leaned forward. “What do you mean, grandma?”

“See here. I peeled it So here’s the white part.”
She cut some more. “Now look. There’s dirt again
and another layer of peel inside.
Then the rest is all white. That’s just the way
some people talk to you. A lie outside,
and then a little truth, and then more lies,
until you get to the white truth inside.
I guess you’ve seen enough — how people are?”

Like my stepfather, I thought. My mother, too.
The double scandal of small-town affairs.
My mother, my father’s sister’s husband,
together now in a new town, “in sin”
as everyone called in. I lived with her
and the man I once knew as “Uncle Joe.”
My father fled town when they spread the lie
that he had incest with his own sister,
gaslighting near-incest with false outrage:
they did it first, so it’s all right for us.

Grandmother’s house was just three miles from town.
That summer I tried to call my school-mates.
Their mothers answered the phone; each told me
their sons and daughters were just too busy,
and I shouldn’t bother to call them again.
The steeple-filled streets frowned on my walking.
The place that held my ancestral tombs shunned me.

In the new town, the hated town, I said
“My parents are separated.” I called
the humping couple Gertrude and Claudius.
Stepfather hated me, as I soon grew
to understand I was despised for what
I was and did, a sensitive book-worm,
hated the more for whom I resembled.
(During the courtship, if a slow dive bar
seduction can be called that, he told her
her son was a genius and ought to have
a trust fund to make sure he made his way
to some good college. A trust fund, by god!)

The false white peeled away, indeed, one day
when Uncle Joe, whiskey-drunk, said to me:
“Just so you know” — he never pronounced my name,
“You are not welcome here. Your father pays
child support. A bed, food on the table,
that’s what you get. But when you graduate
I want you out of here. Don’t ever expect
anything from us.” I later learned how
he had dumped his children from Marriage One
into an orphanage. He meant what he said.

“Grandma, I know about lies, and liars.”
(I had already told her everything).
“I’m here right now to get away from them.”

“Out home — this is where you can always go.”
She wiped the onion tears, the anger tears.
The peels slid into the ever-swelling bucket.

ii

The house had been great-grandmother Butler’s,
a four-room never-quite-finished structure,
a living-room door that never opened
since the back porch there had never been built.
It hung in air above root-cellar door.
The roof and the four walls were nothing more
than tar-paper nailed over two-by-fours.
From the road, “a shack.” For Grandma, growing
from childhood to marriage, it was “Out Home.”
Power it had, but no running water.
Bucket by bucket, it came from the spring,
or fell from the stormy sky into tubs,
rainfall for washing, bathing, and cooking.

I didn’t mind summering there, so long
as the cache of books to read held out, so
long as there were woods to run to and from,
and the fierce night sky’s Milky Way undimmed.

This morning, in the kitchen, something new:
an alarming object I had not seen
in the house or the shed or the cellar:
a shotgun (loaded?) next to the front door.

Almost on toe-tip I stood, alarmed. “What
is that?” — I pointed — “And why is it here?”

“It might for your Uncle Joe,” she answered.

I smiled at the thought. It must have belonged
to my now-dead grandfather. She saved it,
perhaps when all his things were sorted out,
the coal-miners’ gear and carpenter tools
no one knew what to do with. Did she know
how to use it? What was it really for?

She said no more, but the gun stayed. Not once
was I tempted to touch or inspect it.
Its aim was at the ceiling, yes, but what
if it toppled over and shot us both?
Each night I was aware of the dark steel,
the double-barrel, the trigger so tensed
that a sleepwalker might load and fire it.

One afternoon, late, we heard someone’s car
come up the long driveway, hump over the wood-
plank bridge, crack-hiss on the close-up gravel.
“Quick! Turn off the lights!” my grandma ordered.
“The TV, the radio, everything!”
She locked the door. We crouched on the carpet
beside the bed great-grandma had died in.
The shotgun lay on the quilted bedspread.
I smelled black powder and spied the brass edge
of the shotgun shells. The gun was loaded.

In the yard, I heard the chickens scatter.
A single set of heavy feet, up steps
and onto the porch. Two knocks at the door,
and then two raps on one kitchen window.

We waited. Grandma was shaking, from fear
or anger I could not be sure. She reached,
and when her hands found the shotgun she calmed.
She crouched. She was ready to aim and shoot.

At the kitchen door, an angry pounding.
“God damn it, Florence, I know you’re in there!”
a bass voice shouted. “I just want to talk!”

The voice … was the voice of my stepfather.

He pounded again, cursed. Glass did not break,
door frame did not abandon it hinges.
The steps receded. A neighbor’s dog barked.
Again the chickens scattered. Another
round of curses as the rooster attacked
and chased him back to his automobile.
The engine started clumsily, gears ground
as he made the turnaround and went back
to the blacktop slope of Ore Mine Hill Road.
We waited for the normal outside sounds
to come back again. Hens, robins, wind sighs
from the high pines that grazed the bedroom wall.

“What did he want?” I finally asked her. —
“He comes out here, days he’s supposed to work.
He’ll take me to the courthouse, he tells me.
He wants me to sign the property away
to him and your mother. He wants this house.
This is my home, your home, your mother’s home,
and home to my sons when they come visit.
When Joe comes in the daytime like this, drunk
or sober, he’s a bad man either way —
I just turn out the lights and I hide here.

“Drunk or insane?” I said to her. “He knows,
or ought to know, I’m here for the summer.
I guess there is no bottom to evil or stupid.”

From this point on, grandma and I became
a secret alliance. Amid the slither of serpents,
she was my only friend.

iii

This time she was peeling potatoes. Peels,
eyes, and dark spots fell into the bucket.
I no longer feared the shotgun. It stood
in its place next to the kitchen door.
She looked at me, at the gun, at the knife
as it deftly pared and sliced our dinner.
“Another story I’ll tell you. You’re old
enough to understand it now, or you will
when the time comes to sort all the stories out.

“I was just ten when my father went to prison.
My half-sister and I were mostly off to school.
Ma was alone all day, worked herself raw to cook
and garden. She learned to can. The winter was bad.
You had to get coal for the stove, no matter what.”
She pointed to the ancient coal stove, flues and pipes
set up to heat the place as well as cook and bake.

She hesitated then, and then it seemed she spoke
beyond me to someone, or in her mother’s voice:
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman here
in the country, alone in the woods. Husband gone
off somewhere, or maybe dead. So a bunch of men
are sitting around in a road-house, drinking beer.
They read the paper and they see a woman’s name
in the tiny print of an obituary,
or read out the address of a man sent to jail.
And, oh, they remember you. Men you hadn’t seen
since you were a little girl in school. It’s like they had
a list that they added to and subtracted from..

“One day a car comes down the drive. Two or three men
get out. And they take their hats off respectfully.
They have washed their hands and faces. You wouldn’t think
they had jobs they should be at, and on a weekday.
They bring you a big sack of groceries. They worked hard
to think of what you might be needing, salt to flour
to cans of soup to a jar of German pickles.
They come in and sit down. They have some of your bread,
crust like none they have ever known, so they tell you.

“Somewhere in that sack there is a whiskey bottle,
so someone says Let’s open it and have a drink!
And you want to be polite. You get the glasses.
They have a drink. You take a drink, though it’s a man’s
drink and you’re not accustomed to it. Then someone says
how lonely you must be without a man around.
And they laugh and make jokes until you blush.
And then they suggest something, and if you drank two
of those whiskeys and you got a little silly . . .”

She paused and looked at me. “...and you give in.” Nodding,
I waited for the rest. “And if you’re dumb enough
to do that, then there is no stopping it. They tell
their friends. They come by the carload to visit you.
That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun here.
Because of the things that can happen to women”.

iv

Grandma Florence has been dead for many years now.
Even the memory of great-grandmother Cristina grows faint.
Nothing remains of the house but its foundation.
Cousins passed by and took photographs.
They spoke to neighbors whose memories were long.
One knew all about the gang of three robbers,
how Albert Butler had gone away to prison.
They said Cristina Butler sold moonshine
right up to and past the end of Prohibition,
how cars came and went to the little “shack.”

“Yes, she sold her moonshine there,” the neighbor affirmed,
“but it wasn’t just moonshine she sold. She sold herself
and her little daughter Florence.”

The truth was in the onion, waiting.