The Knitting Circle Read online

  “It’s her heart,” Ellen said, after a few minutes of welcome silence.

  Mary shifted uncomfortably, glancing at Ellen’s long open face, her deceptively happy eyes. Should she mention Stella?

  Ellen met her gaze. “Sometimes we go along for a bit and I can almost forget she’s so sick. Then she takes a turn for the worse and all hell breaks loose. Like that day you were here.”

  In spite of herself, Mary asked, “What’s wrong with her heart?”

  Ellen touched Mary’s arm lightly. “Now just knit for six inches. Pretty soon you’ll start to see the pattern emerge.” Ellen paused. “Stories are kind of like knitting, aren’t they? Everything intertwined. Everything connected.” She took a deep breath. “It’s complicated,” she said.

  Ellen was young, Mary realized. It was this pain that made her seem older.

  Ellen sipped her herbal tea, staring into the glass as if it held her future. Or maybe her past, Mary thought, peeking at her. As soon as she looked at Ellen, though, she dropped all of the stitches from one of the tiny needles.

  “Shit,” Mary said.

  Gently, Ellen took it from Mary, and carefully placed all twenty-one stitches back on the needle.

  “This relaxes you?” Mary said. “Knitting on toothpicks?”

  “You just knit,” Ellen said. “You’ll see.”

  “What’s with all the instruments?” Mary said.

  “I was a folksinger,” Ellen said, blushing. “I’ve played these instruments since I was a little girl. I grew up in Appalachia. The mountains in North Carolina. My mother taught me the guitar and the banjo. My grandmother taught me how to fiddle. My father and my uncles and my granddaddy traveled around and sang at weddings and funerals. The Brighton Boys. That’s what they were called.” She hesitated as if maybe Mary might have heard of them.

  Mary shrugged apologetically.

  “Anyways,” she continued, “my mother and her mother and all of us sang down in Asheville sometimes, and once we went all the way to Chattanooga to perform. I was just a little bitty thing. And shy as a coon in the daylight.”

  Mary looked up again, laughing. “A coon?”

  “You’d better keep your eye on your stitches,” Ellen said, taking Mary’s knitting from her again. She held it up to show her that she’d dropped a needle’s worth again.

  “Anyways,” Ellen continued after she’d picked up the stitches and returned them once more to Mary, “I couldn’t hardly talk to anyone without turning red as a July tomato, but hand me a fiddle or a guitar and let me sing and I was a different person. It was like the music spoke for me. And these were all traditional songs, you know. We didn’t have a stereo or anything and our radio only got but the one station.

  “I was the only one of my parents’ children that lived. Three boys all died as wee babies. And one sister lived a month or two. I used to walk up the hill and look at their tiny stones. Boy Brighton. Boy Brighton. Boy Brighton. Then Margaret Brighton, Our Little Angel. No one knew why they all died like that. Mama said they just turned blue real slow and died.” Ellen’s voice caught. “Of course now I guess I figured it out.” She took a breath before she continued.

  “Anyways,” she said finally, “my grandma used to sew me up the prettiest dresses. Big full skirts and the tops all hand-smocked. And I had shiny black patent leather shoes and white ankle socks with a big old ruffle around the tops. They would wash my hair with eggs to make it shine, and I always wore a great big bow in it, to match my dress. This was when I was only so high, and off we’d go to this place and that and I’d pick up my fiddle and open my mouth and steal the show. But if anyone tried to talk to me, I would throw up. No exaggeration. I would throw up if I had to talk to people. That’s strange and I know it and it makes the irony of my life now even more profound since I have to talk to doctors on a daily basis.

  “Anyways, I didn’t really go to school. There wasn’t one nearby. My grandma taught me to sew and to knit with my fingers. She taught me how to kill a chicken, how to clean it, and how to fry it just right. I can take the bitterness out of collard greens and I can tell which mushrooms will kill a man and which’ll taste good in rabbit stew. My granddaddy taught me how to hunt and how to fish and how to grow tomatoes as big as a fist. It was Mama who sat with me before supper and showed me the letters and the numbers, and how to read the Bible. But my daddy gave me the gift of music. He could play anything—spoons, jars without tops, washboards, he could even coax a song from certain leaves.

  “Pretty soon, it was the Brighton Boys and Little Ellen. And then it wasn’t too long before it was Little Ellen and the Brighton Boys. My daddy used to pick me up by the waist so I could see the flyers in the store windows. I would trace my name with my finger and feel a tingle there while I did. ‘Don’t you forget, though, girl,’ Daddy’d say, ‘a voice like an angel is both a blessing and a curse.’ I only saw it as a blessing, though. It made people listen. It made people smile. Why, it even made people jump out of their chairs and dance. What’s the curse in that?

  “Well, that curse came in the name of Aidan O’Malley, an Irish boy with a tenor voice that could send chills up your spine from its outright purity and beauty. He came to one of our concerts down in Asheville. By this time, even though I was still called Little Ellen, I had grown up. I was sixteen years old and those ruffled socks and hand-smocked dresses had been handed down to little cousins a long time ago. I still wore country clothes, dresses handmade from thin cotton and big old men’s shoes that worked just fine out in the mountains but I guess looked pretty funny even down in Asheville, the biggest city I’d ever seen.

  “We sang in this cellar club called the Potato Cellar because that’s what it had been once. It was tiny and smelled like dirt and the people could pack in all sweaty and full of beer and we’d have a good old-fashioned hootenanny down there. I would be a liar if I said I never noticed Aidan till he noticed me. Because I did. I saw his big old blue eyes and this wild mane of black hair and I thought, God keep me from that devil. When we’d show up to sing, first thing I’d do is find him in the crowd. If he didn’t come, I’d feel all wrong in my stomach. But if he did, I’d sing right to him. Not looking at him. No! I could never do that. But from my heart to his.” Ellen blushed deeply. “I know how foolish that sounds. But I was just a foolish girl then.

  “Anyways, one day we go to play at a big outside festival with dozens of singers from all over Appalachia, and there are hundreds of people there, and it’s July and hot as a dog with the brightest sun you’ve ever seen. We’re scheduled to go up late in the day, so I was left to wander by myself. But I was not someone who would go up to PeePaw Lewis, one of the greatest fiddlers ever, and introduce myself and talk awhile, or sit down at a table of ladies and ask them how they baked such a good blackberry pie. What I did was fill a plate with ham and biscuits and beans and potato salad and walk way far from everybody, down by a small creek in the woods. I took off my shoes and sat on a rock with my feet dangling in that warm creek water and I daydreamed about songs and maybe even about Aidan O’Malley. Then, all of a sudden like, I happened to see Aidan sitting on another rock a ways away. My heart started going crazy. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Or maybe my misfortune.”

  “But surely he had followed you there,” Mary said.

  Ellen looked at her, surprised. “Why would you ever in a million years think that?”

  Mary laughed. “Maybe I’ve had all the romantic notions drained out of me. It just makes sense that he would have seen you go off and that he would follow you there.”

  “You got five inches there,” Ellen said, “so pay attention to what you’re doing. One more inch and then you’ve got to turn the heel.”

  “That’s the way I was around that man. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t tell which end was up and which was down. He made me dizzy and he made me dumb.”

  Mary turned her attention back to the sock. A pattern had appeared, a seemingly complicated pattern that reminde
d her of an old Fair Isle sweater she’d had as a girl. “Look what I’ve done,” she said.

  Ellen grinned at her. Something about Ellen made Mary feel safe.

  “So what happened with this Aidan character?” Mary said.

  “That is such an enormous question that I’m not even sure how to answer it. What happened that day? Well, I can start there. I saw him and he came right on over. ‘You’re Little Ellen,’ he said, and of course all I could do was nod like a bullfrog.

  ‘You sing like an angel,’ he said, ‘yes, you do.’ Turns out he was a singer himself. Straight from Ireland too. He knew all the traditional songs, and before I knew it we were laying on that sweet green grass by the creek singing together with that hot sun beating down on us. My goodness, when I talk about it I can smell that creek, a little sulfury, and the rich earth that is Appalachian earth. All of a sudden I realized that time had been passing and I needed to get back. So I jumped up and found my shoes, all flustered, like I’d been doing something wrong instead of just laying there singing away the afternoon. Aidan, he jumped up too, but he was all calm. He pointed his finger at me and he said, ‘Little Ellen, I am going to marry you someday and keep that voice of yours all to myself. You wait and see.’”

  “He kept his word, didn’t he?” Mary said. “He’s your husband, isn’t he?”

  Ellen frowned, good and deep, and chewed her lip. “It’s time to turn that heel,” she said.

  “Isn’t he?” Mary asked again.

  “No, he is not. Never was neither.”

  Mary waited, but Ellen didn’t say anything more.

  “Okay,” Mary said. “Time to turn the heel.”

  Ellen turned the sock to the purl side. “Purl eleven stitches. Purl two together. Purl one. Turn the sock around.”

  It sounded like poetry, the way Ellen said these words.

  “He took me away from there. That’s the first thing I can never forgive him for,” Ellen said softly. “Appalachia runs in my blood. If you’ve never seen the mist over the Appalachian Mountains come evening, then you’ve never seen anything at all.”

  “Then why did you leave?” Mary asked.

  “He started courting me. Bringing me small bouquets of wildflowers, and sitting on my porch strumming and singing and whispering to me with that Irish brogue. He was from the town of Galway. He would go on and on about the Atlantic Ocean. How big and stormy it was. How magnificent. He would go on and on about the little islands across from Galway. He would speak to me in Irish and it was like he was putting a spell on me. When he was away from me, all I could do was think about him. And when he was with me, I couldn’t think at all. A very unhealthy situation.”

  She glanced at Mary’s sock. “Now slip one stitch. Then knit five. Good. Knit two together through the back loop. Why, look at you! You’re a pro at this. Knit one and turn it around again.”

  Ellen instructed her through the next two rows. “Now you just keep on repeating all that until you’ve used up all the stitches on either side of that old gap and there are just twelve stitches on that needle.”

  “This is going to turn into the heel of a sock?” Mary asked.

  “You bet,” Ellen said.

  “So?” Mary prodded. “What happened?”

  “So finally my mama takes me aside one day and she tells me to take that boy down into the woods and to make love to him until I got him out of my system.”

  “Your mother said that?”

  “My mama was a practical woman. She knew a person couldn’t live so full of love. I took a big old bath with lavender in it and brushed my hair until it was all shiny and when Aidan came up our path I ran to meet him. ‘Let’s go pick some blackberries,’ I said. We walked and picked these perfect blackberries. All fat and purple.

  “Mama said don’t come back until I was clearheaded. But I never did get my head cleared. Once I started, I only got more full of him. If I couldn’t think straight before, why, he made me go brain-dead. We stayed away that afternoon and that night and the next morning. Until Aidan said, ‘I’m taking you back to Galway with me. With your voice and all the people I know there, we’ll get rich and famous in no time.’

  “So we stumbled back up to Mama and I said, ‘I’m going away with him.’ Well, she dragged me inside and said, ‘Don’t be stupid, girl. What you two have been doing gets done every day by men and women and goats and cats and every one of God’s creatures. That isn’t love. You don’t run off with a boy just because you like doing that with him.’

  “She tried to talk sense into me. But I wouldn’t listen. I packed my things and took my fiddle and walked down that path with Aidan O’Malley into my future.

  “If I close my eyes, I can see that old house, and hear the creak of the rocking chair on the front porch, and smell my Appalachian Mountains. But that day I just left it all behind. I had just turned seventeen years old that summer. A child, like my very own Bridget is now.

  “Before I knew it I was living in a flat in Galway, Ireland, with no heat or hot water and my fingers were so cold it was hard to fiddle. Plus we were so broke we were living on cabbage and potatoes and day-old bread. Aidan took to yelling at me if I complained or if I cried, so I tried to be quiet about it. Then you know how it goes. When you believe things can’t get any worse, they go on and get worse. So when I was late one month, I talked myself into believing it was from not eating so good. A girl needs nutrition to keep herself regular. But when I missed a second time, and I found certain smells, like those potatoes and salty air and even Aidan himself, made me feel all queasy like, I couldn’t deny it any longer.

  “When I told Aidan, he said, ‘I thought you were taking care of things.’

  “I didn’t have any idea how a girl took care of things like that.

  “Then he said, ‘I got you booked at clubs all over the county, and the next one too. We need the money.’

  “I guess I had already figured out we weren’t getting rich no matter how many jobs he booked. But I still hoped he’d marry me. Especially with a baby coming. He never said a word about it, though, like that wasn’t why I had come across that ocean with him.

  “Back home, Old Lady Hera way up in the hills had a way of getting rid of babies. You drank something and the baby just slid right out of you, nice and easy. I had heard it didn’t even look like a baby, just a glob of blood. But I didn’t know who could do such a thing in Galway. That’s the second thing he did that I could never forgive. He made me think, ever so briefly, about getting rid of my daughter. I tell you, that man was the devil.

  “He took to dropping me at whatever rooming house was putting us up in that village, and he’d go to the pub and find some girl and go home with her. Some girl who didn’t have swollen ankles or a stomach out to here. My skin got all splotchy too, and that’s when I knew I was having a daughter because a girl takes her mother’s beauty. She needs to.

  “One day, we were in some village somewhere. The rain had finally stopped and it almost looked pretty, all the thatched-roof houses and green hills in the distance. Aidan was acting kindly that day, even though he could hardly stand to look at me anymore, what with my big belly and my splotchy face and my hair all lank. But we went and got fish and chips and sat on this stone wall to eat them. There were purple flowers all pretty against the green, and for the first time in a long while I almost felt happy. Aidan even kissed me, like he used to. I was thinking he might coax me into those fields, and I would kiss him until he remembered how much he loved me. Next thing I knew, there’s water everywhere.

  “Aidan jumped off the wall and said, ‘Holy Christ, your water broke.’

  “‘It’s too soon,’ I said. ‘My baby’s not coming until September.’

  “‘He’s coming now,’ Aidan said.

  “I felt so bad for him, all wild-eyed with panic, that I didn’t even tell him that the baby was a she, not a he. No sooner did I have that thought than the first pain came and doubled me over.

  “‘Holy Christ,’
Aidan kept saying. ‘We are in the middle of fucking nowhere. Holy Christ.’

  “He led me back into the village, stopping every time another pain took me. I had only gone in the ocean one time, but that’s what I kept thinking about, how the waves grabbed hold of me and took me into shore.

  “Finally we got to the pub, and it seemed like everyone figured out what was going on as soon as we walked in. An old red-faced lady took me away from Aidan and led me to a back room where there was a narrow bed with the freshest-smelling, whitest sheets I had ever seen.

  “Eighteen hours in that room, and the baby just not coming. The pain like a hot iron inside me. Aidan kept saying, ‘Holy Christ, Holy Christ, Holy Christ.’ He kept saying, ‘Somebody’s got to help her.’ Then that red-faced lady said, ‘I got no choice,’ and she put her foot up on the end of the bed to brace herself, and she stuck her hand up me and she yanked my baby out. I think for maybe a minute or two I passed out from the pain. But then there was a lot of commotion and I heard the worst words I had ever heard. The red-faced woman said: ‘This baby is blue, may God help her.’ And right away I thought of home and that row of small stones. Baby Boy Brighton. Baby Boy Brighton. Baby Boy Brighton. Margaret Brighton, Our Little Angel. I thought of my mama saying that those babies were just blue, and they died.”

  “Ellen,” Mary said. Gently, she laid her knitting on her lap so that she could reach over and place a hand on Ellen’s arm. “My God,” Mary said.

  “You know what it’s like for a mother to want to save her child’s life?” Ellen said.

  Mary wanted to tell Ellen she did know what that was like, that she had once believed a mother’s love could save her child. Wasn’t that what a mother was meant to do? To protect her child? Now she knew the guilt that came from letting your baby down. But all of those thoughts caught in her throat.

  “Somehow she did make it through the night,” Ellen said, as if she still marveled at that. “When morning came and she was there, breathing big deep breaths, still tinged blue, Aidan wrapped me in a blanket and carried us, one at a time, to the car. The village women had brought the baby clothes, tiny white things, hand-stitched and soft.