December 1958
Jackson, Mississippi
On the only night he ever tried to hit her, my Great Aunt Helen staked my Great Uncle Gert’s hand to the doorframe with an ice pick. Days later, my mother, then seven years old, accompanied her mother and her Aunt Alice to dinner at Helen’s.
My mother knew nothing of the ice pick. But she knew her aunts sometimes got slapped when 7 and 7’s got poured too liberally. “But you see, Aunt Helen could lift a canoe alone. Even Gert was never fool enough to try to hit her until that night,” she told me years after the fact.
What she remembers about that long-ago dinner is Alice and my grandmother, hair still as bottle red as Lucille Ball’s, craning their necks over the table as Helen slipped out to the chicken coop for eggs.
My grandmother pointed at the fresh hole in the doorframe, already bleached and stripped of blood and bone fragment, and whispered to Alice, “Look! Alice! That’s where she got him!” Then the two sisters began giggling. I imagine them choking on their cigarette laughter as they would when I knew them and mumbling, as I would hear them do when anything delighted them, “Well, I wish you would listen.”
I picture Helen in that moment of staking—both her and Gert about 5’9”—evenly matched for girth and meanness.
Gert takes a swipe.
Helen, ice pick in hand,
pins him wriggling to the wall.
Somehow, anachronistic seer, she tries out catchphrases from the 80’s movies my mother, never mean nor able to carry a canoe, would later love.
“Get away from her, you bitch!”
She leads with that, but she’s no Ripley, and the shift to third-person trips her up.
She shakes her head and tries again.
“You’re terminated, fucker!”
Which is better, but now her shoulder’s starting to tire. Gert’s heavy and beginning to groan.
I mean, sure, Helen can lift a canoe, but she hasn’t been doing those institutional pull-ups for years like Sarah Connor.
She un-pins him.
From the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, she grabs a bottle of iodine, red as hemoglobin, and just as quick to stain.
She pours it into his wound.
Wraps his hand in gauze.
In silence, they eat greasy butterbeans and dry cornbread.
Gert doesn’t complain.
I’m sure the experience wasn’t as satisfying to her as it became in legend. I’m sure it felt as empty as the hole in the doorframe that she never let him fill.
And yet I think of my undefended mother.
So many drunk uncles.
So many sisters who didn’t see.
And I bow my knee to Helen in retrospect:
Oh, Mt. St. Helen,
You Mighty Eruptor,
Mask her in magma,
Cloak my mother in catch phrases,
Portage her across those pricks in your canoe of ice-picks.
Pour them only water and never gin.
Sing, Helen, you Rage that launched a thousand Achaean Achilles.
Hide my mother in any wooden horse.
Sing, Helen.
Sing our girl safer to me.
Kelly Foster Lundquist teaches writing just outside Minneapolis (though she is originally from Mississippi). Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many places, including Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and Image Journal. She’s a Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop alum. Kelly’s work has been nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net Award as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board as well as the Central Minnesota Arts Board. Her book, Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (Eerdmans), will be released in October 2025. One of her all-time fave historical revenge moments was Anita Bryant getting pied in the face by Tom Higgins in 1977. She was two months old at the time, and it makes ger retroactively proud to have come into the world so near that beautiful comeuppance.
