The Haberdasher's Wife

The haberdasher’s wife hooked rugs, rags and tethers and a bowed needle that made her thumb bleed and her eyes red as fire engines. She drank Jonestown Gin from a tea cup, closeting it between the sewing basket and the laundry hamper, and swore she’s never read Neruda, though she did once tip the mailman at Christmastime. Her youngest child Rudy died from rickets, his legs so twisted and deformed that he had to have braces coddled between them, a piece of wood the size of a doorframe secured in place with metal screws and washers. She hooked rugs to assuage the pain and forget her mother’s Quaker Bible, the one she’d written all they’re birthdays in, and the hot iron that melted nylon socks to the ironing board. Her mother fashioned a Ketchup bottle into a starch bottle, pinpricking holes in a rubber stopper that she tamped into the neck of the old Ketchup bottle, which was now a starch bottle, or flagon. She sprinkled starchy water all over his father’s work shirts then ran the hot iron over the linen like she was scrapping gum from her shoe. She ironed creases in everything, shirt sleeves, trouser cuffs and elbow patches, saying all the while that she hadn’t met Neruda, and anyhow, Spanish was beyond her. She claimed to know Joseph Brodsky, having met him at the church bazaar, the same one where the harridan and her sister had a table, and where Dejesus and Gibbs and this racy haired woman said awful things about God and a paraplegic who rode in a go-cart with and orange flag. When she was a little girl her mother put the Quaker Bible on top of her head when she had a headache, telling her it would chase the headache devil clear out of her head and might even help her sleep, which it didn’t, but she couldn’t blame her for trying, even if it was silly and sort of odd. The sky threatened rain, a coalmen’s rough-coat dragging its tails across the not quite blue sky blue.