My Home’s in Montana

Only weeks after my adoption had been finalized, I was whisked to the first day of first grade with a new first name – along with the new last one. The Catholic school in which I was enrolled recognized only the names of saints. This obliterated the only first name I’d ever known, “Honey,” and bumped up to first-name status my middle name, Elizabeth (Hebrew for “consecrated to God”).

My own biological parents had never married, and their own parents saw to it that they were released from parenthood so they could pursue their educations. I was properly delivered to the Guardian Angel Home in Philadelphia and subsequently placed in the arms of Mrs. Nana, an older woman who had worked at the Home for years. At the time, Father McMahon and the Home’s small staff were preoccupied with the upcoming County inspection of the facility. With new linoleum being laid, plumbing being updated, and generally everything being brought up to fire code, we orphans were in the way. The older children were temporarily transferred to the nearby Saint Joseph Home for boys without fathers. I was a constantly wailing infant girl, requiring ‘round-the-clock rocking and patting and cooing over, so Father McMahon accepted Mrs. Nana’s offer to take me to her house and keep me there until suitable adoptive parents could be found.

Weeks, then months passed with Mrs. Nana telephoning Father McMahon, regularly, to detail the trials of nurturing such a pathetically sick infant. She convinced Father that I should not be returned to the Home as scheduled. I might infect the other children with my screaming, spitting up, and refusing to sleep.

Years later when I read those notes in my long-lost file, I smiled with gratitude at Mrs. Nana’s convincing lies. She’d shared the truth with me as early as I can remember—that upon arrival in her house, I coiled into sleep, tight as a rose bud. I grew from birth to toddler, bringing her more delight than she’d ever known. “You were such a little flower,” she told me once, “I almost named you Rosie.” She decided that “Honey” more appropriately fit my sweet, but peppery disposition. And she and I became inseparably attached. Fortunately, Father McMahon never tried to come between us. In fact, he died without ever updating my file. He kindly allowed me to disappear from the system into Mrs. Nana’s imaginative and loving world.

By the time I was three years old, I’d learned to set a proper table for tea--damask rose cups, embroidered napkins, warm cream, raisin scones, sweet biscuits, butter, jam, and the New York Times. My table manners were as highly polished as museum furniture. I could pour and pass, and tweeze sugar cubes with silver tongs as gracefully as the Queen’s cronies. “Extend your pinkie finger when you stir,” Mrs. Nana reminded me. “Butterflies need a place to land.”

I was five years old when the error of my “misplacement” was accidentally discovered. The Guardian Angel Home had been closed by the County, and clerks from the state had been sent to glean the files. My birth certificate, buried in the stacks, generated an all-out search. One of the retired cooks recalled Mrs. Nana having taken home a baby.

The case worker told the judge in the Pennsylvania Orphans Court that when she arrived at Mrs. Nana’s house, it looked as though I’d been kept like a doll. She wrote in her file: “The child was fresh-faced and freckled, crinoline dresses and patent leather Mary Jane’s. The child said, ‘Yes, thank you, please’ and ‘may I,’ and asked if I’d like tea.” In another column, she noted that I had not attended pre-school or Kindergarten. “The child asked did I know that all God’s creatures were created equal, and that love was forever. She recited the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Three Little Pigs.’”

The judge granted Mrs. Nana a series of visits. He said it would soothe my separation anxiety. This set Mrs. Nana howling and roaring, and the judge hammering his gavel.

My new parents, Myrna and Brill, had originally wanted a clutch of kids. Their plan was that once Brill retired from management at Whitman’s Chocolate, in Philadelphia, we’d all move back to Bethel, Delaware and work his family’s farm. When I was their only child (their biological baby boy, Ray Dean, came shortly after my arrival), we drove down to Bethel on weekends. The two of them with their deep Delawarean accents talked loudly over the noisy engine of their truck. Occasionally they’d shout to me in the backseat where I was crammed between boxes of Whitman Samplers for Brill’s mother, Granny Hattie, and empty, prickly crates that on the return trip would brim with peaches, tomatoes and green beans from Hattie’s roadside stand.

“Haunnie, how’s it back there? Yo’r awful quiet.”

Myrna complained that I was unresponsive. She’d been bending over backwards to reach me with an array of nicknames--“Kutchie,” “Stinkey,” “Boop, “Bibbie,” “Bip,” “Brat,” “Snippity-pie,” and finally “Miss Mouthy.” I held “Honey” in my heart.

One morning she was braiding my hair. Against my tugging, twisting and shouting, she was hurting me. “That’s it,” she yelled, “No more gettin’ away with murder. You’re gone t’ Catholic school.”

I didn’t know what that meant but it made me shiver.

Ordinarily, on the first day of school, Myrna would have walked me and probably prepared me better for my renaming, but she was in the late stages of birthing labor in the Nazareth Hospital on the other side of town. Brill followed her strict orders to spit shine my oxfords, fasten my uniform necktie, and hold my hand, tight, all the way. The hand holding was a first for father and me. My pretzel-stick fingers in his doughy palm freed me from the worry of approaching another new environment.

We passed the Guardian Angel Home, which had been re-opened as the Holy Innocents Youth Center. In front of the ranch-style structure was a row of swing sets splayed in a dusty patch. The swings had leather seats and long chains, the kind if you pumped hard in the upswing, would let you dip your toes into the sky.

“I’d like to swing there, someday,” I said.

“You oughten never want t’see that place again,” father said. That’s where Mrs. Nana got a hold ya.”

Hearing Mrs. Nana’s name brought on the missing feeling, the one that caused my rough crying and the wailing that sliced the inside of my throat, shredded my words and pin-pricked my lungs, airless.

“No crocodile tears,” father said. “Swallow hard. We all got pain ta bear.” He patted my back. “There’s nothin’ a little singin’ won’t cure,” he said, and he broke into the Kingston Trio’s, “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.”

I’d learned that crying and pleading wouldn’t bring back Mrs. Nana. It usually made things worse with either Myrna trying to rock me with her sweaty hands, or father unbuckling his belt to threaten the tears back inside me.

By the time father and I reached the schoolyard on the border of the old, Italian cemetery, I’d quickly absorbed his cheer, and the two of us were belting out the chorus:

“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley

Hang down your head and cry

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley

Poor boy, you’re bound to die.”

A young nun greeted us at the wrought-iron gates of the school. With the white box of her nun’s habit squeezing her head and framing her full-moon face, she looked like a living TV. Her matching plastic collar extended up and around her neck and forced her to bend and turn with a mechanistic stiffness. Yet, she moved gracefully and when she spoke it was soft like the sound inside a whelk. Her hands waved breezily, and her skin glowed pink like faded cherry blossoms. In my mind, she became Sister Cherry, and next to Mrs. Nana, I would cherish her most.

While I saw Sister Cherry everyday for the next six years, my court-approved time with Mrs. Nana decreased. At first, Mrs. Nana had been invited to the important functions in my life--Confirmation, first Communion, and first May procession to honor Mary, the Blessed Mother of Jesus. But when it was time for Mrs. Nana to leave, the phantom cutting in my throat would return. The sobbing would shift to a rattling in my chest, the hoarse coughing would simmer to breathlessness, and someone would unpeel me from around Mrs. Nana’s waist or ankles and drag me away where I’d drop into exhausted sleep.

“Children forget quick,” Myrna told Mrs. Nana, patting her out the front door.

In third grade, Sister Cherry invited me to the convent for lunch. She sliced tomatoes and spread mayonnaise on toast with salt and pepper. We carried the sandwiches to the sun porch and pulled cushioned wicker chairs to the piano stool which doubled as a table. Sister listened to my chatter. I said I couldn’t memorize “Lincoln, Blinken and Nod.” I had my own rhymes and my own version of the poem. She dabbed the toast crumbs with her pointer finger, the way Mrs. Nana had done when she was intent on listening. Sister hummed, agreeing and understanding.

She pointed through the jalousie windows at the orange tabby she’d been forbidden to bring inside. He rubbed against the screen door until Sister and I sat on the steps with him, taking turns twirling our fingers through the vanilla whirl between his ears.

“Mrs. Nana moved away,” Sister Cherry said.

“I know,” I said. Sister didn’t ask me how I’d known.

“Some things we just know,” she said, lifting my hand into hers. She wiped my face with the cotton cuff of her sleeve, the pale blue part that was mostly hidden beneath the black caverns of her dark outer garment. “You’ll see her again in heaven,” she said.

“That’s too far away,” I said.

By sixth grade, my class had progressed to the middle school in a new building on the opposite side of the old, Italian cemetery. Sister Cherry guided us down the winding path through the tombstones. Her black veil filled with air like a sail, and we followed breezily to the threshold of the next grade level. It was customary to curtsy goodbye. Then our new teacher would take over. Sister Rose Maureen waited in icy calm. She looked like a pillar, draped in a black banner. Her fierce gaze burned away my inclination to tear after Sister Cherry and wrap myself around her as I had done years before with Mrs. Nana.

She ushered the class into the room, using a tin cricket to direct us. One click to walk, two to stop. She slammed shut the classroom door, shaking the clock on the wall and knocking off the door calendar.

“Pick it up,” she demanded, spinning around, pointing to me.

“Please,” I reminded her gently, a perfect mimic of Sister Cherry.

“You get one chance with me, girl,” she said, whacking my desk with her pointer. The rubber tip flipped off, bouncing like a grasshopper across the desks. A riot of laughter ripped across the room provoking Sister to whip our desks with a vengeance.

“Now you’ve got three things to pick up,” Sister snarled, glaring me into submission. In the terrified breathing of my classmates, I heard them warning me not to remind her to say please. I handed her the calendar and pointer tip, searching her face for a hint of kindness. After all, I reasoned, she’d been named after a rose.

“Where’s the third,” she demanded. I looked blank. Sister swatted the air with her wide-spread hand, stopping just short of my face. “The thumbtack. Can’t you count?”

By the end of the first quarter, I’d had my face slapped for laughing at the wrong time, for laughing too loud, for laughing too long, for taking too much time in the bathroom, for belligerence, for tardiness, for whispering, for watching, for showing expression, for not showing it, for moving, for not. Her handprint in stinging red across my cheek faded to glowing white. I wore the marks to recess, through lunch, to church, to confession, to fire drills, air raid drills, and to May procession practice.

“What were you whispering about,” she demanded once.

I’d been slow to answer and she smacked me. “What were you whispering about?”

You, I thought, You got your name when the devil “Rose” from the dead.

That year it seemed like the school never closed, not even for a hurricane. It was around 2:00 p.m. on a Thursday. We had only an hour more to go. The wind threatened to smash through the windows. Sister ordered us under our desks. We huddled in silence until our parents came to pick us up. Father was one of the last to arrive.

Sister whipped her long black cloak over her shoulders, preparing to escort me to his truck. The wind ripped the school door from her hands and she left it banging against the building as she stormed with me in tow through the torrential downpour.

Father reached over to the passenger side window and rolled it down. Sister stabbed the air, yelling over the soughing wind.

“Her comportment is as bad as her attitude,” she shouted.

“This is no time for discussion,” father said. “Let the child get in the truck.”

I watched through the beating rain on the windshield. The black storm descended on the school yard and it seemed that Sister vanished into it.

Father took away my transistor radio as punishment for what Sister had told him. I’d been disconnected from songs. I hadn’t yet grown into any of the lyrics, but I relied on them for their sense of loss. Without them, I would thrash against sleep for what the next day of school would bring.

By April the soil of the marshy field behind our house had exploded with feeding grackles. Their slow screeching sounded like rusted playground swings. The gurgling creek broke from the snowy silence. Forsythia burst into a saturation of yellow and lilacs bowed with blooms. Father told me, there were 60 days left to the school year. I twirled my umbrella in spring’s deployment. I had ceased wishing the school into a fiery blaze and let go of the image of Sister’s singed fragments flying over the cemetery. I erased the daydream of the trolley car splattering her in the street, and released my classmates from prodding her gooey heart with sticks.

I jumped puddles, muddy water sopping my legs and the pleats of my pinafore. I faced the sky, the rain washing my face, thanking God that it would soon be over. I no longer yearned for Mrs. Nana or Sister Cherry to rescue me, no more wishful thinking for a nurturing teacher to explain away questions. I had abandoned the secret sunshine room in my head. Sister and her influences had broken down the front door. They’d invaded me, but I’d escaped through the back door, was running wild in the mental freedom of my final days with her.

She must have sensed my joy and scorched me with her gaze. I wrapped myself in my imaginary magic blanket but still it chilled my blood that her mean eye could follow me beyond geographic and temporal boundaries. My classmates and I slammed school books into storage as though we were thrashing the brute. I’d developed a brazen curtsy, and longed to confront her: Why did my elders teach me to avoid evil then purposefully confine me with it? I practiced asking this question in the bathroom mirror at home. Each time my voice grew bolder, more righteous. And, each time I slashed my own face with Myrna’s bright berry lipstick to mimic Sister’s slapping.

That final week of class, the room was stifling. My pencil slipped in the sweat of my hand and my papers dampened and rippled when I touched them. Sister complained that our whispering could be heard across the cemetery and she closed the windows to punish us. One of my classmates, whom we called Poor Ralph because he was another of Sister’s targets, loosened his necktie.

“Tighten it,” Sister said. “Tighter,” she demanded, swatting Poor Ralph’s knuckles with her fiberglass ruler. “Tighter,” she yelled, hitting his knees until he dropped to the floor.

She fished beneath the front panel of her black garment and drew out a huge handkerchief to wipe the sweat from her own pointy face.

“Open the windows,” she commanded. Alfred Lubeski was her chosen one, always selected to do her good bidding as she called it. “I bid you show them how you got your answer,” she’d say.

Alfred’s starched shirts glowed. His hair swooped perfectly on his forehead, and he performed her feats with Mercurial alacrity, never tripping over the milk cartons or fumbling the loose leaf, or blushing when she made an example of his perfection. “Alfred do this; Alfred do that; See how Alfred does it,” she’d say.

Sister announced that we had completed our required course work earlier than expected.

“Your reward…” she said. Excitement shushed through the classroom. She slammed the desk, and shut us down with piercing stares. “I give an inch. You take a yard,” she rasped. We held our breath to prove how quiet we could be.

She handed Alfred a pile of mimeographed sheets to count and hand out. We smothered our disappointment, having hoped for the breezy recess yard, milk chocolate squares, jumping rope, or to escape the school early.

“This is a cowboy song,” she said. “’My Home’s in Montana,’ by Christine Turner Curtis.”

Alfred had miscounted and a few students were left without sheets. The whispering flared up again. Some students cleared their throats, trying to get his attention. Sister rapped the desk with her pointer, splitting it nearly in half. One end dropped at her feet. The other nicked Alfred’s chin, and he yelped, letting the papers flutter and scatter. Blood splotted his shirt. I cupped my eyes not to see what was about to happen and skimmed the first verse of the song, despite the fact that Alfred’s body was being slammed against the blackboard:

“My home's in Montana, I wear a bandana,
My spurs are of silver, my pony is gray.
…riding the ranges my luck never changes,
…foot in my stirrup I’ll gallop away.

I heard Alfred drop into his seat, the first desk in the first aisle. His face hit the board ledge. Blood from his nose squirted on the board, his desk and shirt.
I followed the wood grain of my own desk, pretending it was a stream, skipping over rocks someplace far away from that room. The bumping, shoving and Alfred’s terrified sighs got closer. Sister was knocking him down the aisle when I jumped from my seat and ran out the back door, screaming for help.

“How dare you?” Sister yelled, swishing after me. I sped down the fire escape exit, and tore across the old, Italian cemetery, up the hill, over the railroad tracks, and down into the woods where I hid under the train trestle.

“My home's in Montana,” I repeated over and over to the hard pumping of my heart. “I wear a bandana, My spurs are of silver, my pony is gray.” It was near dinner time when I stepped onto the bridle path and headed home. Myrna chinked out her cigarette when I slipped in the door.

Brill said, “Not to worry, young lady.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. His calling me “young lady” was usually a sign of trouble. Brill explained that Sister had had a “nervous breakdown.” I said I didn’t care what she had, I wasn’t going back.

For years, through high school and for awhile during college, I kept in touch with Sister Cherry. She told me it was against policy to ever discuss the incident or what had become of Sister Rose Maureen.

“Just pray for her,” she wrote. Her letters were filled with enthusiasm about her new training as a Montessori teacher. She’d requested a transfer to another Order of nuns, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, (SSJ), as they were known for their dedication to education.

“The most upstanding women I’ve ever met,” Sister Cherry wrote. She helped establish the Montessori program at a private school outside Philadelphia. At age 82, she died in the nursing home run by her Order.

…

Years later, when my own daughter was ready for pre-school, I evaluated every public and private program within a feasible geographic range of our home and finally enrolled her in the Montessori program that was directed by Sister Cherry’s former affiliates. I volunteered hundreds of hours with the school and formed strong bonds with a few of the teachers as well as administrators.

In the third grade, my daughter asked for piano lessons. My husband and I had a second-hand Cunningham upright hauled into the house. We hired a retired musician who came highly recommended by our pediatrician and my daughter progressed quickly in the “John W. Schaum Music Book,” from “Oscar the Octopus” and “The Dragon song,” to “Myrtle the Turtle.” One afternoon, she and I were flipping ahead through the pages of music.

“I remember that one,” I said. “’My Home’s in Montana.’”

“Play it for me,” my daughter said.

“Well, I never really learned it,” I said. “Maybe you can teach me.”

Liz has an MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a Bachelor’s Degree in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her work is also published in the Painted Bride Quarterly, Transfer 37, The Kennesaw Review, Open Mouth Poetry Anthology, U.S. 1 Newspaper, and www.alongstoryshort.net.

She is a freelance writer whose projects range from feature articles for the architectural home plan industry and copy for business-to-business marketing. She is a creative writing mentor to a group of senior citizens in her community, and is currently seeking a publisher for her novel, “Nine Lives.”