Uncle Abner’s Grains

“I’m taking you to Uncle Abner,” said Ma. She carried me across the hauling road, then down the overgrown track to Uncle Abner’s place by the river. Bushes scratching, black flies nipping—all adding to my agony. 

I’d fallen from the large maple tree in the backyard. I was up the tree in the hopes of sighting the famous prize-winning racing schooner, the Bluenose, out in the bay. There’d been a rumour she would pass this way on this day, and I’d set my heart on seeing her.  

And there she was. Already anchoring in the bay, sadly not in full sail. I mean, I was just a boy and didn’t know then, that full sail was for out there racing across the ocean, not when in the bay at anchor. But I could see the main mast. Over a hundred feet high. Flags flying. The crew waved, I’m sure at me, out on the end of the topmost branch of our old maple. 

I hooted. “Come and see, Ma. Come and see the big boat.” That was when I fell. Slammed into the ground face-down. I thought I was dead. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Heck, I couldn’t even open my eyes. I’d never known pain like it. Getting the strap at school was a mere tickle compared to this. 

Ma came out, calm, quiet. She tried to lift me. Gently. Ma was a tiny woman with no flesh on her at all. Slender, I think you would call it now. But then she was just plain skin and bone. She must’ve had muscle—the tin bath of wet washing she lugged out to the line every day I know weighed a ton. This was the washing she took in to earn a few dollars because we had no idea when Pops would be back from working on Baffin Island. That’s the far north. 

The dollars and cents she earned were what fed us. Not sure about herself, Ma was always last to put her plate on the table. Always last to sit down. Always with a smile and a twinkle in her blue-grey eyes. “Let’s eat then,” she’d say. 

I was in agony but starting to come around by the time she got me to Uncle Abner’s. I was still having trouble breathing, still feeling my heart banging in my chest, still wondering if I would go to heaven or hell. But this felt like hell, so maybe… 

Ma had to stoop to get in through Uncle Abner’s back kitchen door. I could feel her breath going in and out as she held me tighter against her chest. 

“C’mon in,” said the soft voice of Uncle Abner.

“Yes,” said another voice, sounding more like the morning chatter of the chickadees,

“C’mon in Millie, coffee’s on.”

It was Aunt Effie. Always had coffee on, or fresh-from-the-oven barley bread, or Blueberry Grunt. That was always my favourite of all. If things had been normal, my mouth would be watering for sure. 

But it wasn’t normal. I’d slammed into the ground and killed myself out cold. And Ma had come to Uncle Abner’s for him to bring me back to life. 

He slapped their big pine table. Aunt Effie must have swiftly gathered up the coffee pot and cups, the oil lamps, and the hooked rug she was working on. “Lay the boy here,” said Uncle Abner. 

The sun shone through the cracks in Uncle Abner’s tin roof. Like the sun’s rays shining behind Jesus in my Sunday School book. So I thought maybe heaven was really on the cards for me. I couldn’t see Jesus yet but I could smell fresh bread, which I thought was probably just as good. I could hear them talking, more of a whispering, like the tall grasses down in the swamp in the fall of the year as things start to crisp up and turn all shades of reds and browns. Rustling in the breeze. 

Next thing I heard was a rattling, and I froze. Did Uncle Abner, so well known for his cures, use snakes to heal people? 

They told me later what it was, this was after I’d got up from the table and eaten barley bread with homemade partridgeberry jam and walked home with Ma, helping her carry a basket of fresh dug potatoes from Aunt Effie’s garden. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still hurt from the fall. I still ached in every poor bone in my body.  But knowing I hadn’t gone to live with Jesus yet made me feel a whole heap better. I know I had a lucky escape because if Pops had been home from the far north, he’d have given me a leatherin’ for being right up that tree in the first place and causing Ma all the heartache. 

We never did tell him. Ma and me kept a lot from him in those days; how we’d pick and sell berries at the roadside for twenty-five cents a quart. How I ran errands for folks in our lane. If they wanted smokes from the store I’d get his old bike out and pedal over the rocks and stumps and bring them back a pack of ten. They’d give me one for going. Lots of things like that. It didn’t feel like work. 

Ma and me picking berries was the best though. We’d sit side by side and talk. Or not talk. Just listen to the quiet together, or the happy thrum of the hummingbirds, or the faint twitter of other families further out in the blueberry pasture doing the same. 

One day we never did forget was the day we were out picking and Ma needed to stop for a pee. She found a spot behind an Indian pear tree and squatted. Her yells and screams you could have heard across the land. It turned out Ma had peed on an ants’ nest. A big ants’ nest. And they all went crazy and bit Ma, big time, for what she’d done to them. 

It was a story that stayed with the family, a story to be told in the long winter evenings sitting in the kitchen by the wood stove, regaling tales of the “Do you remember when…” kind of thing. There were never enough chairs for everyone to sit; I often found myself under the kitchen table looking at all the legs. Many folks were already in their nightclothes by that time of the night. 

The call would go out that Ma had made pies and the folks would get up from their beds and come in to gather around our kitchen table. I could mention who had varicose veins and who had ingrown toenails. But that would be telling. 

Did I forget to tell you about Uncle Abner’s rattling? I suppose I should explain more. He was known in the area for being able to cure things. From toothaches to warts. They’d probably call him a quack now, but back then Uncle Abner was all we had. 

So there I was, stretched out on the big scrubbed pine table with the sun’s rays belonging to Jesus shining down on me, when the rattling began. Uncle Abner had a handful of grains—what kind of grains I never found out, but hard dried grains that rattled. He shook them in his big hands, much like someone shaking a pair of dice, and threw them down hard on the table.

Ma told me the grains began dancing. Jumping up and down like jumping beans. And Uncle Abner watched them and said, “All is well. There be no bones broke, just bad bruising.” He was right. I got my breath back in the days that followed and I believed in him from then on. Aunt Effie, too. After Uncle Abner died, many years later, I took my own kids with their ailments to see Aunt Effie, who knew which herbs could cure anything from a cold to a spider bite and why certain people should not look at the full moon wearing green. 

She made some kind of tincture she gave out in tiny jars. Putrid smelling stuff, but it sure gave you a good night’s sleep if you put it on the sole of your shoe an hour before bedtime. She also never faltered from her theory that tying knots at intervals along a length of black thread— only black would do—was good for warts. The story goes she had a still in the woods and made some kind of liquor from birchbark. Apparently a small glass every night before bed got rid of arthritis, among other things. 

Their granite headstones stand, side by side, on a little rise in the riverside cemetery. Aunt  Effie lived to be a hundred and nine. Never once had a headache. Never once saw a doctor. On  her stone is carved a sheaf of barley. There are wild blueberry bushes growing beside her grave.  You can’t really transplant wild blueberries. We always knew the blueberries found her. 

Uncle Abner passed on just a few years before Aunt Effie; they reckoned he was around hundred and one, although no one ever really knew how old he was. I don’t think he did either. There is a coiled snake engraved on his stone, and I’ve often wondered if it was a rattlesnake.  The inscription beneath reads, Abner Gladstone McKinnon, lover of the wilderness, curer of all ills and keeper of everyone’s secrets. 

On his grave there are little heaps of grains—those hard rattly grains I’ve never forgotten. And I wonder if, one day, they will jump up and down, like they once did for me, and bring Uncle Abner back to us.