Excerpt of Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
(Page 3 of 5)
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We had a green roadster with a rumble seat where I usually
rode in solitary splendor, then with my little fox terrier,
Rinty, later run over by a motorcycle he was chasing. In this
roadster one time my mother was stung by a yellow jacket and
I wept for her. She had blood on her skirt, probably from her
period, but I, connecting cause and effect, thought the wasp
had caused her to bleed.
The hurricane of 1938 arrived when my twin sisters, Joyce
and Janet, were only a few months old. The wind increased,
shaking the small house. I don't know where my father was,
probably at work. We had no telephone, no radio. My mother
decided we should take refuge at a neighbor's house down the
road. We walked, my mother burdened with boxes and a suitcase
and one of the twins. Although I was barely three I had
the job of carrying the other twin. At the neighbor's house I
remember the moaning wind and the French doors that suddenly
began losing panes of glass, and men hammering boards
over the outside of the glass doors, making the house gloomy
as well as strange.
My mother came from a large rural family of five girls and
four boys. A few years after the hurricane we moved to a house
in Plainfield, Connecticut, a house that belonged to my mother's parents, Lewis and Sarah (Geer) Gill. My mother's antecedents,
the Gills, Geers and Crowells, came from longtime
farm people who began to be absorbed into the textile industry
in the nineteenth century. The Crowells had an artistic bent;
one was a master furniture maker, another created stencils for
the decorative panels of Hitchcock chairs. During the time we
lived in the Plainfield house, my father was abroad, helping set
up a textile mill in South America.
This roadside house had been a gas station at one time, one
of several of my fertile-minded grandfather Gill's business
ventures. He had invented devices for textile machinery that
made him no money at all, then started the gas station and, a
few years after we lived in it, converted it to a fabric and millends
shop. He could fix anything and was a skilled carpenter.
These grandparents, whom the children and grandchildren
alike called Ma and Dad, had a huge garden where I loved the
exotic husk tomatoes, peeling their papery covers away and eating
the sweet-tanged fruits. Dad had a grumpy old dog named
Duke. There were a few cows that my uncles had to tend and
an electric fence around the garden. My cousins and I thought
it was fun to make a human chain, one grasping the electric
fence, the one on the end getting the magnified jolt.
My maternal grandmother, Ma, née Sarah Mayo Geer, was
descended from two orphan brothers who came from Heavitree
near Bristol, England, to Connecticut in 1635. She always
seemed harassed by her large family of children, and with so
many people swarming in and out, the house was less tidy than
comfortable. She washed and ironed her paper money so it
would be crisp. She may have starched it. She was impatient,
but a sucker for kitchen gadgets and an inventive storyteller
with a grand sense of humor and at one time wrote a newspaper
column. The family, being what it is, has always assigned
my interest in books and writing to Ma's influence. Why not?
Others in the family have written books and essays as well;
my uncle Ardian Gill wrote a novel about John Wesley Powell's
journey down the Colorado River. Cousin David Robinson
wrote for National Geographic for years. Music and art and
crafts were strong interests. My mother and her sister Gloriana
(everyone had two or three nicknames and we called her
Hikee) painted. The oldest sister, Sarah, got greatly involved in
tinsel painting and resurrected the stencils of their great-uncle,
Bill Crowell. All of them sewed their children's clothes. My
mother had a loom and wove rugs. My sisters and I grew up
accepting the making of things as normal. For years I sewed my
own clothes until computers made sewing machines so complicated
and cranky that the fun was gone.
Excerpted from Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx. Copyright © 2011 by Dead Line, Ltd. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
