Rhea Côté Robbins

Something That Will Cure
an excerpt from Wednesday's Child, Winner
of the 1997 Maine Chapbook Award

Every family needs to keep in the house something that will cure headache, toothache, ague pain, lameness, bruises, cramps and other kinds of pain and suffering, and what is there so good as Renne's Pain Killing Magic Oil. Try it. Sold by I. H. Low & Co.
--- The Waterville Mail, Vol. XXIV, No. 18, October 28, 1870

When I had cancer the second time, the time I lost my left breast, I lived far away from the shirt factory by then. I know women in my family who work there, but I had been gone from the sight of the mill, within walking distance from my home for many years. There are many women, maybe 500 or so who work in what I fondly call "her mill". There is the male equivalent in my hometown of "his mill". I often refer to "his and her mills" when I speak or think of my people. I had been gone from "her mill", and the women who work there are of my people - the French-speaking or French cultural people whose ancestors originated 400 years before from France.

Ironically, the Statue of Liberty, given to the United States from France as a gift symbolizing freedom was not necessarily meant for the French immigrants who came to the U.S. via the land bridge from Canada. For the French people immigrating to the U.S. in the 1600s, the statue should be relocated somewhere in the St. Lawrence. There the French would also need a translation of "give me your hungry and your poor".

The women who work in the mill, and whose aspirations have much to do with the dominant society under which their ancestors came to rest and be employed by, still speak the language of their ancestors. Or if not, it is apparent in their demeanor, gesture, and their esprit de corps. Body language. It speaks to me. That and the magic the women weave over the years. The superstitions I grew up with. Holy Water sprinkled on the windows during a rainstorm to prevent the lightening from striking. Are we going to have a field day tomorrow? Put your Virgin Marys in your windows so we will have a sunny day on the morrow. Talisman of luck; omens of fortune - good or bad - ran in close existence to reality. Hat on the bed, eating utensils falling on the floor, itchy noses, open umbrellas in the house, spilt salt and more. The secular were not as mystical or as powerful as the sacred keepers of ourselves, our children and our men. Scapulars were the death-defying cloth medals on string which could keep you from drowning in the mighty Kennebec, for Christ's sake.

I had been gone from the mill for many years when I had cancer the second time and I lost my left breast. News travels fast that travels unofficially. Among the women workers was a sacred woman; a holy woman. A woman of God. I never saw her face and she has never seen mine. She reaches across the distances I have traveled and she calls me to the banks of the river once again. Her hand reaches out to bring me home across a divide no mile could ever measure. She, in the language of my people, in our prayers, from my deepest memory, my oldest self - older than my lifetime - reaches out to me in my ordeal of breast cancer and sends me a scapular medal and murmurings in the French language prayers which can evoke providential personal assistance. Through the grapevine of women, this holy woman gave to my mother-in-law to give to me, her gift of scapular medal which I hung on my bedpost where it remains to this day. I have never set foot in the mill a moment of my life other than to shop in the "seconds" store, and it does not matter that I live far away in body, I can be recalled.

Rhea Côté Robbins is the author of Wednesday's Child, 1997 winner of the Maine Chapbook Award.