Whistle, My Lad, and I Will Come

Abstract

108 GINA OCHSNER Whistle, My Lad, and I Will Come  n the north country the wind howls over mountaintops, scours steep valleys. A broken jumbled land, here raised high as if an invisible hand had pinched and tugged the hills to their jagged, uneven heights, and there between those mountains deep ravines and valleys of such steep pitch and constriction, horse and cart can hardly pass. These narrows, the old women say, are of the Devil’s doing. Having been banished from God’s heaven, the Devil raked his sharp fingernails beside and between those steep rises. Then, his fingernails worn to nubs, he burrowed like a worm into the limestone karsts and bedrock. There he stewed and fumed. So angry at his fate, so hateful of the good earth God made, from within the bowels of the mountains he hurled rocks toward heaven. Shaped by fury, propelled by pure rage, these rocks punched through the mountainsides and almost broke free. Odd shapes, these rocks, half in the mountain, half out. Erratics, geologists call them. We know them as Devil’s fists. No open fields, no glade or bower. Just rock above and beside us. Scant soil beneath our feet. Houses made of stone and sod tuck into narrow channels of valley sunk in perpetual gloom. Fog hunkers into the dark seams of the narrows, creeps under sill and door-sweep, and this on a summer’s day. A people of frugality and thrift, we love light and keep it in any form we know. From the weariest of embers our youngest learn to coax a roaring fire. My mother was, as her mother was before her, an expert candlemaker, rendering the fat from her animals into long soft sticks of tallow that yielded a wobbling greasy low light. On Ascension Day, Sundays, Good Friday, days when superstition forbids our men from mining in the caves, we process through the narrows to a solitary graveyard on the scablands, a flat bed of flinty rocks, our votives and tapers clutched in our hands as if they are compasses. i 109 Here our solemn-eyed children grow old quickly. Necessity demands they make themselves useful, even in play. Brake of blackberry thorn and bracken, from these they gather kindling; pliant canes become bird cages. They tend high-spirited geese, sturdy-legged goats, and keep pink-eared pigs in byres. They fletch the arrows that pierce the hearts of deer and rabbits who wander unwisely too near. Of formal instruction there is little need. For pity’s sake, to make sure the woman was still alive and her fire well stoked, when I was a child my mother sent me to the hut belonging to a spinster. She taught some of us girls simple arithmetic and read to us from the Song of Roland. Beowulf. Breviaries and bestiaries, she showed us both. The leather and cloth of her precious tomes trembled in her shaking hands. Fanciful creatures unfurled their scaled bodies and taloned claws, or regarded us coolly from behind their regal manes, their great golden wings flapping. What I learned: the beautiful words and pictures in books that moved me to wonder and awe bore little value in a world that preferred the hard logic of what could be touched, counted, measured. Our boys learn everything they need to know from their fathers, who first learned from their own fathers. As early as seven and eight years of age they will go to the cave, descend to the threshold of the mine where the men keep the canaries and teach them tunes they first learned from the wind. They trim the wicks of oil lanterns and of the candles so necessary in the labyrinthine chambers, anterooms that can without warning plummet to deep crevasses or open to a dazzling cathedral of glistening stalagmite. They attend to the pick axes, sharpening them on stone wheels. They throw small rocks at the corpse birds that foretell bad luck in the mines while their older brothers, fathers, uncles toil below . The smaller boys hold the unspooling cordage that marks the way through the interior passages and caverns. It is easy to lose yourself in the...