A Crack in the Wall by Betty Jane Hegerat

Author:Betty Jane Hegerat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oolichan Books
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Water from the Well

*

Soon Marta will be here to slide the pins from the coiled braid at the nape of my neck. Her fingers will fan the pleated grey waves across my back. “Mutti!” she will say. How long since they washed your hair?”

Ilsa was marooned, perched on a green vinyl chair that sucked at her thighs where her dress was hitched crooked beneath her. She’d awakened with Marta on her mind. She whispered her daughter’s name to the stiff-fingered rhythm of the knitting needles. The names of all her children: Marta, Walter, Annaliese, Bruno. The living and the dead. Not sure if she chanted them aloud, or in her thoughts, until the Filipino nursing aide poked her head into the room and asked, “You calling for me, Ilsa? Or is Bernice making all that racket?”

Before she could answer that it was the one in the other bed moaning and carrying on as though she was dying, someone else stepped through the door.

“What are you knitting now, Oma? Slippers or scarf?” The tall girl brushed snow off her shoulders.

“Jeannie.” Ilsa tried to blink the sticky webs from her brain. “I thought you were coming in the morning.”

“It is still morning, but you’ve probably been up since dawn. Did you have a good sleep?”

“With that one jabbering?” She pointed over her shoulder with the free knitting needle, stabbing into the air on the other side of the room. “Since she came, who can sleep?”

“Water, please.” The voice from the bed sounded like fingernails on a screen.

“See what I put up with? Always complaining about something.” She frowned at a dropped stitch many rows back, and put the wool aside. “No school today?”

The girl pressed a cold cheek to hers. “School? Oma, don’t make me a little girl again. I’m on my way to work. At the bank, remember?”

Now the voice from the other bed commenced a low keening. The old woman lay scattered in the bed like the broken limbs of a tree, her hair sprouting from her skull in tufts that looked as though they would blow away with a puff of breeze.

“Be quiet!” Ilsa shouted.

Her granddaughter shushed her. “What is it with you and Mrs. Ridley? You know, you talk just as much as she does.”

“I?” Steadying herself with a hand on the night table, she stood up tall in her stout black shoes. They tried to make her wear bedroom slippers in this place. As though she had nowhere to go. “I mind my own business,” she said. “I’m a quiet woman waiting here patiently to die.” She tugged at the back of her skirt, pulling the wrinkled fabric free of her damp skin. Someone has stolen my garter belt and stockings again. Marta will have to go to the Army and Navy store.

While her granddaughter unwound a scarf as bright as buttercups, Ilsa stooped to hoist a water jug from the floor. Shuffling the few steps to the mahogany dresser—her only piece of home—she tested the

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