Category: Novel Chapters

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The Itinerant’s Table Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Walloon

The question I’ve fought with over the years has been what was my grandmother doing, telling us we came from Tombstone?  She wasn’t lying.  We did come through there.  In fact, by the history, Tombstone and its surrounding area seems to be a place we settled in for a relatively long time.  But we didn’t start there.  Perhaps she began there because she really didn’t know what came before.  Or perhaps she was uncertain of what she had been told and was only relaying what she, herself, experienced with her family.  But if I look at it, the tales she handed down to us from Tombstone were tales from the storyteller she was.

Which, on my wanderings with my grandmother, has me posing  the question, what exactly is a storyteller?  All the world has names for such people.  In the Irish, they are the seanchai.  In Navajo, they are Baa nahashne’ii.  All of them share certain qualities.  Let me give an example – a story of a storyteller.     

There once was a seanchai by the name of Thomas the Rhymer.  Did he exist?  Not sure.  There are many ballads and variations of his story.  Many names had he.  Many people he was or might have been.  But the one I relay here?  He was a great storyteller, finding food and shelter over someone else’s fire while wandering in the homeless fashion of a seanchai.  In return, he told great stories of history and heroes and through him, distant people who had never met each other were one people for they had one story of themselves.  So you see, the seanchai made “a people”.

So what was my grandmother doing?  She was making her people.  She was giving us a history, rooting us to legends, like Billy the Kid, and binding us to a myth – Tombstone.  In my mind, she was giving a single thread in the great fabric of history to hold onto.  Why?  Because in 1939, she had nothing to hold onto and she blew away.  What she didn’t know at the time was that this exact thing had happened over and over again in our family.  A generational memory of finding home and then being without home – itinerate.  If I look at it, Grandma was making us secure from a long, deep abiding memory of being insecure.

So – after that fateful evening dinner, the leftovers of which became the entire change of my family history, Amy said “You are not going to believe this. You guys were everywhere.”

And if we are everywhere, we are from nowhere.  We are not from Tombstone.  We are drifters.  Solitary souls.  Eternal migrants.  That one path is now the tell of me.  And it starts with Marie Sedt, the immigrant refugee from Belgium.

Belgium has always been an enigma to me.  The idea of Belgium, anyway.  Here is a tiny country surrounded by great nations that could be easily overrun at any time and often has been, I daresay.  A country that speaks French and Dutch and German.  A country that claims to be neither French nor Dutch nor German – a matter of pride here.  A country whose very story of itself seems always to be of three people, yet they claim to be one, even though their story in the telling is spoken in as foreign a tongue to one as it is to the other.

Who was the storyteller that achieved this – three people into one?  How many fires and how many stories had to be conjured to make one country out of three truths?  Greater a storyteller than the Rhymer or William Shakespeare and a greater poet than Rumi, I should say! 

To me, Belgium gives such hope – this little country.  This country that bleeds its struggle with language and culture in the open but resorts no longer to guns and weapons to win the argument.  For in guns and weapons, there is no winning.  The twisting, bending of compromise helps to maintain their identities as individual communities but forces their feet onto common ground.  Only this way does Belgium survive as one.  Here we – we survive as one.  Not without pain.  Not perfectly.  But they persevere and so do we.

This, however, was not always so and it was when Europe was tearing itself apart during the Reformation when Marie Sedt’s parents left their house, their people, their country.  They were sent adrift in the world to be people from nowhere.  So Marie Sedt was born in Canterbury and christened in the French Church.  Not a French Huguenot, mind.  As I have said she was a Walloon – a Protestant Walloon.  And what she did there, that simple, immigrant girl growing into a simple, immigrant woman can only be told by spinning a tale, as I have done here – The Weaver of Canterbury.         

I have my grandmother’s tell.  We are from Tombstone.  I have one word my mother left concerning her history.  One written word left ink on paper in a book as she was dying of lung cancer.  The question she was answering – ”Where did your family name come from originally? What is its nationality?”  My mother replied, “Welsh”.  For my mother, you see, was Welsh.  My father?  Dickson.  He is to the Scot.  But me?  I am Walloon.  A daughter of an eternal migrant and nowhere is my home.  

c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved

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The Itinerant’s Table Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The Recipe Box

     Do you have one of these?  Perhaps yours came from some kitchen shop when you were married last week or five years ago or ten.  Or forty.  Perhaps it is tidy, with recipes typed or handwritten in calligraphy.  Perhaps all the recipes in there were written down by you, taken from cooking magazines or your best friend’s mother or a television chef or the internet.  Or maybe, just possibly, you don’t have one of these.

     I do.  I have two.  But it is one that concerns this story – namely, my mother’s.  My mother’s recipe box is a story unto itself.   It is small and old and gray and metal.  On its front are two labels.  The first is the manufacturer – HON.  The second is a green Dymo label on which is written, “Call Backs”.  It is exactly the size to hold three by five index cards and looks like its original purpose of manufacture was to sit upon someone’s desk in a business office back in the 1950s.

     Instead, this little box took a wayward journey.  It ended up in my mother’s house and became the repository of a long and detailed history of its own.  Are there typed cards in there? Yes.  But there are many more cards written by many different hands.  There are cards with names on them – people who are as familiar to me as my mother.  Others have names of strangers.  Yet others are nothing more than recipes cut from the newspaper and glued to a card.   

There are tidy, white cards and others that are stained and tattered and yellow.  These, I suspect, were either my mother’s favorites or else they are ones she made once and the recipe was such a trial as to cause the card injury in the making of it so it never saw the light of day again.  Of this latter type was the Prune Ladder recipe.  It takes two cards.  One lists the ingredients and cooking instructions.  The second is devoted to compiling the “Ladder”.  It includes a drawing.  I don’t ever remember eating this Prune Ladder but I will say, by the stained nature of the card, my mother tried it once. 

So in this box is my life with my mother.  Recipes that were my favorites to eat while others hold memories of long nights at the table, sitting with my glass of milk handy as I slowly worked my way through the plate of detestable organic matter my mother called, “dinner”.  But what is most interesting to me about this box is what is not in there.  What’s not in there are the things we ate most of the time.

I know my most familiar meals are not in the box because I have searched and searched it for, let’s say, Pinwheels, and nowhere is that recipe to be found.  And as my mother passed away many years ago, I struggle to make these foods now and then when I want to return home to her.  They are my life – my history, my story.  Many hours were spent with her in the kitchen watching these meals made, but, as did my mother, I never wrote them down.  Thus, what I remember of my mother’s kitchen and the taste of that memory has become a journey of a sort to reclaim what was never written down.

So – where did these recipes come from if not from the box?  I have thought on this question a great deal as I drift upon this pig path of my story and it has been on this wandering that I have discovered something.  Food that tastes much like my mother’s is made far, far away from Tombstone. 

So how can this be?  Obvious now, isn’t it?  Because we weren’t born of the dust on that mesa.  Because we came to Tombstone from far places and from these far places, I know now that a story is not just a mouthful of words.  It is the food over which the words are spoken – the bartered return for the storyteller’s tale.  Here, on my mother’s table, I see the journey of my family, the itinerates on the long road from Belgium, leaving little hints of who we are in the things we eat. 

And so – I leave this here – a recipe of my family – given freely from our long road and put right here, from the place where I think the liking for it came.  A little pebble picked up along the way.  A tiny gem.  A treasure handed down from one pot to the next.

Belgian Waffles

There is more to Belgian cooking than waffles, I know. Other foods more Belgian and less stereotypical. But we had waffles.  My Aunt Helen, when describing my grandmother’s losses in the flood of 1955 said, and I quote, “She lost her dishes and Uncle Stan’s yearbooks and her waffle iron.”  My mother made waffles as well.  She had one of those old waffle makers, you know?  With the electrical cord covered in thread?  Hard to clean.  Anyway, to celebrate my high school graduation – my first champagne and Mom’s Belgian Waffles and an ending and a beginning.

c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved

Waffles:

2 cups all-purpose flour

¾ tsp salt

8 eggs, separated

½ cup melted butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups whole milk

Mix the dry ingredients first. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Beat the egg yolks until thick and smooth.  Add melted butter and vanilla extract to the egg yolks and then slowly mix in flour and milk, alternating between the two as you go. Then fold in the egg whites.  Make sure your Belgian waffle iron is hot and if it is not non-stick, spray with a cooking spray or lightly brush with a vegetable oil (I use expeller-pressed Canola).  Each waffle takes about 1 ¼ cups of batter.  Pour batter into hot iron for about 3-4 minutes until the steam stops. Recipe makes about 6 waffles. Note – there is no sugar in these waffles. Mom’s were not sweet like many other recipes because …  

Blackberry Topping:

This is simple but difficult.  You are going to need to be aware of how sweet your blackberries are.  If they are very sweet, cut down on sugar.  If they are very tart, cut down on lemon. So –

½ cup blackberries to cook

1/3 cup sugar

1 TBL lemon juice

½ cup whole blackberries

Blend together and sieve the seeds.  Then add into this compote, a half cup whole blackberries.

Crunchy topping:

4 TBLS butter

½ cup quick oats

¼ cup brown sugar, packed

¼ cup chopped walnuts

In a small pan, melted butter. Turn heat to medium high, stirring in oats, brown sugar, chopped walnuts. Stay by the pan, stirring, until contents are brown and crunchy.

Serving:

Place a Belgian waffle on a pretty plate.  Pop a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.  Drizzle blackberry topping over ice cream. Sprinkle with crunchy topping.  

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The Itinerant’s Table Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The Weaver of Canterbury

     Marie sat back, her arms yet flung over the beater, her hands floating in mid-air, perfectly still as she drifted away from her work not for the first time today.  It was hot.  Hot and she wanted to be outside, with her feet bare and immersed in the River Stour.  She closed her eyes, feeling the cool mud envelope her feet and the shallow water at river’s edge caress her ankles. 

     “Marie!”

     She started, listed left, and hit her head on the frame of Monsieur Clarisse’s loom.

     Jeanette snickered.

     “If you do not warp that loom correctly and finish today, you will pay when Master Clarisse returns to it tomorrow.”

     “It is so hot, Madame. Can we not open a window?”

     “It is hot outside as well.”

     “But there will at least be wind.”

     “There is no wind,” Madame Clarisse replied.  Marie gazed up from the heddles to meet her Mistress’s stern gaze.  The woman’s mouth was perpetually drawn down in a frown, but not from a life of ill-temper.  Marie always mused it was from the weight of her double chin, which was substantial.  Something as weighty as that was bound to draw down what was above.

     Marie smiled weakly. “Please?”  

     With a sigh, Madame Clarisse walked to the window.  The wooden heels of her shoes clicked in time with the rhythmic banging of the beaters from her three other looms.  She opened the window behind Marie and as she turned on her heel, she said, “Now you’ll have the insects to distract you.”

     “Merci,” Marie said.

     “Now work.”

     Madame Clarisse shuffled across the weaving floor. Jeanette giggled again. 

     “Get to work, Jeanette,” she ordered over her shoulder as she threw open another window.  Marie gazed in that direction and found Monsieur Faidherbe grinning at her, his long, gray hair hanging loosely from the ribbon at his neck.

     “It is quite an act of trust, Marie Sedt, to be given the task of warping Monsieur Clarisse’s loom. Best not let love’s distraction send the threads twisting through those heddles.”

     The man winked as he pulled the beater.  Daniel, his draw boy, moved forward and began lifting and lowering the heddles to set up the next row to be woven. Marie pulled herself up from her knees and leaned further into her Master’s loom.

     “I was not thinking of love, Monsieur. I was thinking of the river.”

     Marie had threaded sixty-two heddles of the one hundred and eighty-two heddles needed for this work.  She quickly inserted the last eight red, silk threads in her left hand through the remaining eight heddles and reached for the next bundle of ten.

     She hadn’t lied, really.  She was thinking of the river.  But that was only in the few seconds before being barked at by her Mistress.  Three seconds before that, she had been thinking of that Frenchman and as he passed through her mind again, she shook her head with a frown and focused on the work in front of her.

     That Frenchman.  That is what her father called him and he only called him that once, one and a half months ago.  On a very, cool Sunday in early June, Marie and her family were at service in the French Church.  She was singing and was overcome by a strange itch on her forehead.  She moved her hand over her face as if brushing away an annoying insect, but it remained.  So she looked up and found the warmest, brown eyes fixed upon her.  She stared at them and they at her and in the silence between them, she could hear mumblings about God and Jesus Christ floating in the still air.  Suddenly, the warm, brown eyes flicked away to her right.  Startled, Marie followed them and found her father’s glare bearing down on her.  Quickly she gazed down at her hands and dared not look up again until the service was over. 

As they stepped from the church, her father growled under his breath, “Never are you to look upon that Frenchman again, Marie.”

Marie hadn’t meant to look at him.  She hadn’t known of him or that he was French.  Her gaze was an accident really.  But Marie did know, of all things, her father’s dislike for the French and now that she knew the warm, brown eyes were French, she would never look upon them again.  She knew better. 

Her father, Corneille Sedt, had come over from the Spanish Netherlands in 1588 with his wife and two, young sons.  He had been moving before that, endeavoring to stay clear of the religious conflict between the growing population of Protestants on the continent and the Catholic Church and its followers.  He, himself, was a Protestant, but did not agree with the violent fervor of his Huguenot cousins.  And it was those, especially in France, who made being Protestant more difficult – nee impossible – for Corneille. 

They destroyed statues and defaced paintings.  Idolatry, they called it, was abhorrent to their faith.  Unfortunately, that idolatry was but the art of the soul to the Catholics and if there wasn’t distrust and dislike before, this destruction of property in the name of God brought on a fiery wrath.  Thousands of Protestants were hunted down and murdered in France and this battle spilled right into the path of the young Corneille and his growing family.  Thus, as many had been doing for several decades, Corneille, his wife, Jeanne, and his sons, Isaye and Samuel, boarded a boat in Antwerp and landed in Canterbury.

Here, as with most immigrants to a new place, they sought out their kind.  In Canterbury, many of the French-speaking Protestants refugees had landed and the people of England in that area made a little room for them.  Not out of kindness, mind.  They were commanded to do so by their Queen.  For these people, those the local folk called “the Strangers”, brought with them the master skill of fine silk weaving.  No need to look to France any longer to import such things.  Now England had their own, living in a French-speaking enclave known as, “The Weavers”.

There was no need to hurry to learn English in The Weavers.  Everyone spoke French and that community was composed of French and Walloons, Corneille’s people.  And so Corneille set up his house, began his work, and stayed enveloped in the Walloon community of The Weavers.

His first child born there was Marie, his first daughter. As she grew, he kept her insulated from not only the English, but the French as well.  How many nights had Marie sat by the fire, listening to her father speak of those Huguenots and their religious war.  In Corneille’s mind, he wouldn’t have had to leave his home had it not been for them.

Thus, Marie was born far from her father’s homeland and she grew and the number of her siblings grew and as they did, she, being oldest daughter, helped care for them.  Soon it came time to find her a husband and her father began looking around at all the available Walloon young men.  Marie referred to this time as “the war”.  The men who were agreeable to her father were not to her mother.  The men who were agreeable to her mother, were not to her father.  And none of them were agreeable to Marie because above all things, she wanted to be a weaver.

She lived in The Weavers after all.  Her father was a loom maker and knew many of the weaver families.  So when she was not attending to her younger siblings, she was in his workshop, watching him with his lathe.  But the most precious days of her own childhood were spent delivering new looms to the growing population of the area. 

The first day she stepped into a master weaver’s shop, she knew what she wanted for her life.  There thousands of tiny, gossamer threads hung like the web of spider on the morning mist – a rainbow of color spun around and through and over and under.  The perpetual click of the beater sounded as a heartbeat and the living work of the weaver rolled forth from the loom – a fabric of a life ready for a purpose in the wide, world beyond.    

“Weaving is a man’s skill,” her father said.

Her mother, on the other hand, replied, “The girls weave passementerie.”

“Orphans,” her father scoffed. “And what use are ribbons and frills?”

“She will make money for the family.”

Her father thought long on this.  As a maker of looms, he knew many of the families, including French, who were occupied in the weaving business.  Thus, into one of these French houses, Corneille sent his first daughter.  The day he agreed was the greatest day of her life. 

Marie stepped out of her house, alone that day for the first time.  She hadn’t slept a wink.  And as she crossed the street and knocked on the door two houses away from her own, she felt the first breath of freedom in her life.  The door opened and Marie Sedt walked into the world of the weaver.

So here she had been now for twelve years in the house of the Clarisse’s.  French they were, but Madame Clarisse’s people were from Lille, in Nord, France.  Marie’s mother had been born there.  Such was her luck and such was her life until that day at church with the Frenchman. 

Marie had no intention of disobeying her father.  But wasn’t it the next day after church, Jeanette arrived, saying, “A Frenchman has asked after you.”

Marie tossed her shuttle across the warp, replying, “He need not ask after me and you are late.”

“How do you know which Frenchman?” Jeanette giggled.

“I don’t. Any Frenchman.”

“You do and you are lying.”

“Work, Jeanette,” came Madame Clarisse’s voice down the hall.

And that was the end of that.  Or so she thought.

Two days later, Marie was sent to the spinners for wool.  Her seven-year-old brother, Jean, as per usual, tagged along.  As she came around the corner and left her father’s street, she heard a man ask, “What is your name?”

Marie turned around and her heart tripped with her tripping feet.  The warm, brown eyes of that Frenchman met hers.  He reached to stop her fall.  Quickly, she pulled away as her brother replied, “Jean”.

“Ah!” he said, smiling down to Marie’s brother. “Mine, too, is Jean. And is this your sister?”

“Yes,” little Jean said. “Her name is Marie.”

“Come, Jean,” Marie commanded and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward the spinner’s shop.

“Ouch!” he yelled, wiggling from her grasp.

“One does not speak with strangers,” she hissed.  Worry filled her mind.  What if Jean mentioned that Frenchman to her father?  She squeezed a little tighter.

“Let go!”

She didn’t until they were safe in the spinner’s shop.  She fretted and waited and fretted and waited and when she had the pale, spun wool in her hand, she stepped from the spinner’s shop with great trepidation and hurriedly walked back to her Master’s house.  

The next Sunday, Marie caught the Frenchman out of the corner of her eye.  She entered church and made sure to keep her head bowed the entire service.  After church, she found Monsieur Faidherbe in deep discussion with the man as she gathered up her siblings and headed home, walking quickly behind her mother and father.

So it was a shock when, on Monday, as Marie busied herself at the warping board, the Frenchman walked right onto the weaver’s floor with Monsieur Faidherbe.  As fast as she had looked in their direction, Marie looked away.  She heard Jeanette catch her breath and Marie prayed – prayed as she never had before – that Jeanette would keep her mouth shut.

What would her father say?  What if he walked in right now?  What would she do?  There was talking behind her and she heard the Frenchman’s voice, but what was said was lost as her mind reeled with the anger of her father.  Thread after thread she spun around the warping board until finally someone grabbed her hand.

She jumped and, as she did, the thread in her hand broke.  Jeanette burst out laughing.

“He’s gone,” Monsieur Faidherbe said, quietly.

“W-who?”

“Jean Despaigne. The dyer.”  He let go of her hand.

“I don’t kn-”

“Of course you don’t. It wouldn’t be proper and your father would be upset.”

Marie made no reply.

“I do have one suggestion, Mademoiselle Sedt.”

“A suggestion?”

“Yes. You’ve wound that warp into a knot and it is far more than needed for the ribbon you are making.”

Marie spun her head back to the warp board.  There she found no less than sixty threads wound erratically upon the pegs.

“I believe you only need twenty and it might be good to get all that off of there before Madame Clarisse comes back up here.”

“Y-yes.”

As Monsieur Faidherbe turned to go, Marie said softly, “Monsieur?”

“I will not mention this to your father.”

“Thank you, Monsieur.”

“Especially because I brought him here.”

At that, Monsieur Faidherbe chuckled and slid onto the bench of his loom.

“Daniel!” he called and from the stairs, Monsieur Faidherbe’s draw boy came flying. 

The next day, when Marie crossed the street and made her way to Monsieur Clarisse’s house, she found a yellow flower on the doorstep.  Thinking nothing of it, she took it inside and set it on her loom.  The next day, she found another yellow flower and another the next day and one the day after that.

She should have left them there.  She shouldn’t have picked them up.  But every day, someone left a flower for her and thus every day she thought of that someone.  And Jeanette, Monsieur Faidherbe, and now Madame Clarisse knew who that someone was.

A flower every day until the following Sunday when, arriving at church, Marie spied Jean Despaigne.  He had his back towards her and his hands were clasped there.  And between the index finger and thumb of his right hand, she found a flower just like the six she had received over the course of the week. 

She smiled to herself as she made her way into church.  She sang and prayed and God and Jesus Christ floated around her at a distance, because all she could think about was the little, yellow flower.  So she stepped from the church, following her father closely and into her right hand, someone slipped something small and secret.  She closed her hand gently around it and when she gazed to the right, she found the back of Jean Despaigne walking away.  And there in her palm was a yellow flower.

The next Wednesday, Monsieur Clarisse fell ill and Marie was sent to get his red warp thread for his next project from the spinner’s shop.  With hope, she left the shop, skirted past her own house, lest her mother send her brother, Jean, with her, and rounded the corner of the next street.  She walked slowly, lingering now and then, but Jean Despaigne was nowhere to be seen.  She was entirely disappointed as she stepped into the shop, but as she waited for the thread to be wrapped, she remembered her father’s glare and his growl of an instruction.

Never are you to look upon that Frenchman again, Marie.

So perhaps it was good that Jean Despaigne wasn’t on the street this day and as Marie walked out of the spinner’s shop and crossed the street, she looked up to the cloudless sky and wiped her brow.

“It is hot,” she whispered to herself.

“Mademoiselle?”

Marie froze.  What to do?  She knew her father’s instructions.  There was so much noise in her ears from the surging of her heart, she couldn’t be sure he hadn’t said something more.

“Monsieur?” She inquired without turning around.

“Did you drop this?”

Slowly Marie turned and there was Jean Despaigne and his warm, brown eyes, holding out a yellow flower.

“I – I believe not, Monsieur.”

“Ah. I was certain this was yours.”

He smiled.  Marie smiled.

“I must return before my Mistress misses me.”

“May I walk you back?”

Marie shook her head, backing away.

“No. No. I – thank you. My house is on the same street.”

“There is a problem walking you past your house?”

“We have not been introduced, Monsieur.”

“Ah! Indeed.” He looked down at his feet and clasped his hands behind his back.  He nodded.  “That is true.”

“A –and you are French.”

Without raising his head, Jean Despaigne looked up at her from under his brows.

“And?”

“And we wouldn’t be here in this place if the French didn’t cause all those troubles with the Catholics back home.”

He lifted his chin now and his warm eyes sparked. “Is that so?”

“It is so, Monsieur. According to my father, anyway. I am – I am sorry.”

Marie stepped back, curtsied, and turned away.  Something deep inside her believed she would receive no more yellow flowers and as she rounded the corner of her street, tears fell from her eyes.

And as expected, this day?  There was no yellow flower.  So Marie had spent this entire day dressing Monsieur Clarisse’s loom.  The entire day as the sun now sat on the horizon.

“Marie?”

She sat back on her heels and looked up into Madam Clarisse’s face, tears in her eyes.

“Everyone has gone home.”

“I am not finished.”

“Yes. Monsieur Clarisse will not be well enough to work tomorrow anyway.”

Marie nodded, wiping her eyes as she lifted herself from the floor. 

“It’s hot,” she said.

“I see. Your eyes are damp.”

Marie nodded and said, “Yes. I have – I have weak eyes.”

“I see.”

“Good night, Madame Clarisse.”

“Perhaps it will rain tonight.”

“Perhaps.”

Marie reached the stairs.

“Good night, Marie.”

She descended and walked out into the failing light.  There were clouds overhead and a damp smell upon the wind.

“Please let it rain,” she whispered as she crossed the street.  Her back hurt from leaning all day.  Leaning all day and still not done.  Tomorrow would be heavier, she was sure.

She stepped up to her door and when she opened it, her heavy heart stopped beating entirely.  There her three brothers and one sister who were yet at home were seated around the dinner table in absolute silence.  Her father was standing in front of the fireplace.  Her mother was to his right.  And standing to her father’s left was – Jean Despaigne.

Marie lifted her hand to steady herself in the doorway and did not even look at the Frenchman.  Instead, her eyes met her father’s fixed gaze.

“Marie? Know you this man?”

Marie shook head, whispering hoarsely, “I do not.”

“This is Jean Despaigne. Monsieur Despaigne. This is my eldest daughter, Marie.”

“A pleasure,” Jean said as he bowed low.  Marie tried to curtsey, but her ankles twisted around each other, disobediently.  Instead, she shrugged a little shrug.

“Your mother and I are aware that there is nary a Walloon man of your age that is not married or has not been considered for marriage to you.”

Marie leaned a little heavier on the door post.

“Monsieur Despaigne’s mother comes from Nord, France as was your mother’s family.”

Was she?

Marie thought to say this but there was no air in her lungs to make a sound.

“Yes.”  It was her mother’s voice that said this and Marie gazed in that direction.  There was such a smile upon her mother’s face.  

“Monsieur Despaigne has proposed marriage to you,” her father said.

He has?

Her mother’s smile grew until her entire face shined like the halo of God.

“Your mother and I are agreeable. He is of the honorable family of dyers here and he has promised not to take you away from this place.”

Marie did not answer.  Instead she glanced back to her father and watched his eyes turn moist.  Ah!  So.  This was it. She hadn’t seen it before, but here was why Marie Sedt had not been married off.  Her father was yet a stranger, without a home, and it was the fear of losing her in the wide unknown of England that forbade him from marrying her to anyone.  Marie tilted her head with a small smile.

Her father swallowed hard and asked hoarsely, “Will you, Marie, marry this man?”

Behind Marie, in the world of the open door, rain began to fall gently upon the street.  She felt its cooling breeze on her back.

“It’s raining, father,” she said.

“Yes, Marie. It is,” he replied, quietly.  A tear dropped from his eye and rolled down the deep line on his right cheek.

“Your eyes are weak.”

He nodded a single nod.

“I will marry him, father.”      

Marie turned around, stepped through the open door, and out into the rain.  It fell on her neck as she bowed her head.

“Thank you,” she whispered to it and there, standing in the rain, a hand slipped into hers and Marie Sedt took it.

c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved

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The Itinerant’s Table Chapter 1

All things rise and flourish

Then go back to their roots

Seeing this return brings true rest.

Where you discover who you really are.

                              Lao Tzu

Protestant Immigrants

In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Weavers’ Company (ferm) was in financial straits. Under Henry VIII, difficulties over payment of the ferm were so severe that the King agreed to take a lower rate, it being recognized, at last, that the Company no longer enjoyed the extraordinary power which had justified the original heavy tax. This helped to alleviate its problems and it became more prosperous. However, it now had to cope with the new influx of foreign workers, Protestants fleeing from persecution on the continent. These were silk workers, bringing with them new skills, and although there was natural resistance to foreign competition, the stimulus to trade given by the new materials led to greater prosperity. Londoners took up silk weaving and many foreign weavers were absorbed into the Company.

The Worshipful Company of Weavers, www.weaver.org.UK/history

Chapter 1

What’s for Dinner?

The scent as we come in the door tells us that, but we ask anyway. 

“What’s for dinner, Mom?”

Sometimes it’s an old familiar scent and when we are extremely hungry, that is the smell of coming home.  Other times it’s a whiff of something new that peaks our curiosity with a little trepidation.  New dishes work now and then and other times, they really don’t.  It’s the ones that don’t, when first tasted, we know should never have been made.  Yet – we sit at the table because we must.  Sit and suffer.  Those dinners are a long struggle.  But no dinner is more suffered than the ones whose permeating stench, for want of a better word, reach us before we even open the front door and we truly wish we could just call someone else and invite ourselves over for their dinner.  What’s for dinner – a question full of hope and often answered with utter despair.

As we sit down at the table together – all six of us back then and all twelve of us now – we begin telling a story.  A story that started long ago. A story, that for us, began at the dinner table – namely my mother’s.  She received it from her mother and thus, we received it from Grandma.  It is the tale of our long road to this table, filled with trials and poverty where we are near starvation and wandering from place to place to find a home.   

     We put the pot roast in our mouth and never question Grandma as to this story’s authenticity or its accuracy.  The meat seared in bacon fat first indicates a different legacy, but we don’t see it.  We pop a caramelized potato, also sautéed in bacon fat, and as she tells us our history, the little drums in our ears beat in rhythm to the storyteller’s tale.  

The principal character of our story is a grandmother named Grandma Black.  Second only unto her was Joanna Black.  Sometimes Grandma Black is Joanna Black.  Sometimes they are related in some way like daughter to mother or granddaughter to grandmother.  But what is very important – above all things – is that our grandmother knows Grandma Black.  She loves and respects Grandma Black.  And Grandma Black is a Native to the continent of North America.

Not like we are a native to North America.  No.  She is indigenous.  Sometimes she is 100% and sometimes she is mixed.  Sometimes it is Joanna who is mixed.  And every time the pentameter of story is pulled out of memory and begins its gentle, quiet rhythmic beating upon the drums in our ears, the place from which our tale begins is Tombstone.  My mother is born in Tombstone.  My grandmother is born in Tombstone.  It gets a little fuzzy here, but her mother is born in Tombstone.  All stories start from that desert town. 

A sampling – my grandmother’s grandfather had Billy the Kid’s saddle upon his death; a grandfather was married to an indigenous woman and when Geronimo came through on a war path, he had to climb a tree so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a white man worth killing; my grandmother was nearly coaxed onto a train by child slavers when she was very small.  All this happened in Tombstone, but what came before Tombstone – B.T. – was anyone’s guess.  It’s like we rose – a spectral family taking form from the backbone of that mesa, fed through it’s failing silver veins into something corporeal.  We were born of the dust with no past.

So I was repeating our story – my family story, that is – to Amy, my sister-in-law.  My brother married my best friend only he found her first.  Anyway – we were cooking a family meal like we do.  It might even have been the pot roast because once I made that for her, she was hooked.  Somewhere in the making of this particular dinner, I mentioned Billy the Kid’s saddle and she looked at me with a knitted brow and asked, “Is this true?”

Of course.  Did I not quote Grandma?

“Has anyone researched all this?”

My aunt’s husband had.  Did I mention that?  Yes!  I did.

Silence.

And as I walked around the corner to my house after dinner, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put my daughter to bed, beating that same, low, gentle drum of a story into the heart of her, Amy looked it up.

And in the morning I got a call.  A call that quite literally shook my foundation and bent the rebar of it.  Did I want to know this?  Did I ask for this information?  It never occurred to me to challenge my history – my story.  My story.  Not hers.  My heart.  My rhythm.  All that was the story of me and mine.  Her call began here –

“You are not going to believe this…”

She was so right.  Not only was I not going to believe it, I didn’t want to know it.  I know who I am.  I have myself firmly rooted.  I am the dust born of a place called Tombstone.  I am the child of the itinerant fed mouthful by mouthful on a lost road, the sides of which are overgrown with dry grapes of divine anger.  Small.  Obscure.  A survivor of famine and flood and dust storms.  I know who I am!

So – I pour vinegar over my spinach and sprinkle it with lots of pepper and place it in my mouth, tasting the sweetness of home.  I watch Popeye eat his spinach and never understand what the big deal is about liking it. But then – all my California friend’s curl their lips to greens, in general, and my vinegar-spinach habit, in particular.

“I am the dust of Tombstone,” I repeat.

But somehow, through the cracks of my foundation, a tiny whisper of truth exhales.  No matter how I try to silence it, to bend back the rebar of my foundation, there is no returning to that safe place built for me by my grandmother.  And so, I do what all those before me did when the dervish blew in 1939 – I packed up and followed someone new, in this case Amy, down an unfamiliar road.

And as I walk with her, the places we wander have a certain scent like home – feel like my mother’s table.  If my family had but looked at what it was served up on our plates over the years, hints of who we are and where we came from were there for the finding.  Things which we liked – which we had a preference for – all there as familiars found again on an unfamiliar road.

  “I am from itinerates,” I say.  This is true.  But we did not start in Tombstone.  Our plate at dinner says something all together different.  And if I follow one road, a single pig path winding through a small, hidden vale of our history, I can find a new place to start and build. 

So today, I start with the Sedt family.  Our feet land in refuge in the late 1500s on the soil of merry, old England.  For several decades now, the English government has made their own citizens in Canterbury move over to make room for our people whom the English call, “The Strangers”.  Once the Strangers start coming, they just keep coming. 

Who are we, the Strangers?  Where do hail from?  We are the Protestants.  We’ve arrive from France and what is now Belgium because we can’t battle empires built on religion.  We are small with children and family and fear.  Fear because our style of worship is not that of the empire. 

When war comes to our backyard, we move and move again to get out of its way.  It follows us and we know what we must do.  We don’t want to do what we must.  We don’t.  But we know we have to leave all we thought we were.  Only by crossing great waters can we hope for safety.  And as we arrive in this new shore, we find there are those here as well who wish us ill because we are so different from them. 

Yet, as I’ve said, refugees have been coming for decades to merry, old England and we, the Sedts, find a place forged by others.  We arrive and find a small spot where our customs live on and our language lives on.  A place where we can stop and catch our breath.  Then, after a time, we set about creating life as it was meant to be lived. 

And we begin in 1592 by giving birth in Canterbury to our first daughter, Marie, born of refugees from what is now Belgium.  Even Elizabeth I’s England is struggling to find a middle ground in the divisive matter of God’s worship and we have entered a country of conspiracy and public executions.  Even so, we live in the Weavers, a French-speaking quarter on the River Stour.  We stay separated from the wider community with its upheavals.  We are safe.  We have had our first daughter and it is here, our new life begins. 

Marie grows.  And – well.  Let me stop here.  Let me be my grandmother, make some waffles, and set the little drums in our ears beating a new rhythm to the storyteller’s tale.  Imagine with me a day in the life of Marie Sedt, the weaver of Canterbury.     

c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved