In his truck cab, sliding looks across at her. She’d felt fine, except for the stinging in her palms. Her knee quiet now, the weight off of it. But he wouldn’t drop her at her house.
Only in the emergency waiting room washroom, glancing into the mirror, she’d finally understood. Blood had poured from some gash on her head and dried and blacked out half her face. She looked like she’d been half-peeled.
That had been one beginning.
SHE CALLS THE DOG, walks on. Now, the frondy stands of the asparagus, the stalks that she hadn’t picked in April but allowed to grow. The finest fern. She’s tried to transplant it to her garden, both root and red berry, but it won’t take: It likes only this old pasture land, this thin sandy patch here along the old fence line. Wild and not-wild. In April, she finds the clumps, snaps off the pinkish-green stalks, puts them into a plastic bag kept in her pocket for that purpose. If there are enough, steams off the bitterness, steams them till they’re just crunchy, concocts a saucepan of hollandaise and eats a platter of them. Spring greed: They must be full of vitamins her body is craving.
When she forages, she does so greedily. She’ll gobble whole handfuls of blue-black Saskatoon berries, spitting out the seeds; she’ll pluck handfuls of rosehips, nibble off the apple-flavoured red skins, drop cottony innards and seeds into the tall grass. She feels her cells imbibe. Something potent enters her, the green force of the rangeland. The molecules inside her now, the atoms of this place, after so many decades.
How many decades? Seven, since her mother had dropped her here, dropped her, half-grown, as people from the city drive out this road their no-longer-manageable half-grown dogs and cats and leave them to starve or be eaten by coyotes. Dropped her with her grandparents, though, to grow up with cousins and second cousins on ancestral ranchland.
The Allingham-Coogans, the largest ranching family in the region. English squires and Irish horse thieves, her mother had always said.
The molecules insinuated into her genes, even. Is that possible? She has seen on television that the carbons in fish mark their feeding grounds.
Down the slope, now, some slippery blue clay and raw-edged shale; down to the pond, held in the hill’s hollow like a secret. The pond is full; there’s runoff, there’s the underground spring, the one the feeds the aspens, the damp ground where the Solomon’s seal grows. The pond is unexpected, when you come across it; although it can be heard a long way off, the calls of blackbirds carving up the air: the klaxon shrieks, the liquid warble. In the tangles of dried reeds around the perimeter, rustlings and strange croaking or quacking. Like coming upon an invisible city.
The dog bounds off, and she calls him back, sharply: There are nests, hatchlings. Now, swimming toward them, the chick of a mud hen, the naked red head like a shameful body part. It’s alone, keeps up a sharp peeping as it continues its circle of the pond. She doesn’t see adults, feels a stab of worry: Left on its own, it’s a quick meal for a crow or coyote. But a threesome of rusty-headed, blue-billed goldeneye chug along in the chick’s wake, slowing when it slows, changing direction as it tacks. Are they guarding it? Keeping an eye out for it? Doesn’t seem plausible. Where are the parents? Why don’t they come out, answer that plaintive peeping, chivvy their offspring back to the safety of the group?
She wishes she had not seen the chick alone, its blood-coloured bald head, its peeping.
She turns, urges the dog to heel. The parent birds are likely hiding with the rest of the brood, waiting for the danger to pass. They’ll sacrifice one chick for the rest. Will that lone chick, breaker of protocol, iconoclast, survive to pass on its genes? The mud hens are not rare, as waterfowl go.
The dog looks back at the pond, looks at her, gives a small whine. He’s thirsty, or he thinks the chick is fair game, easy pickings. No, she says. He’s a young dog; she’s still training him. Part border collie, part Alsatian: he has a long muzzle, soft ears, a striking coat of black and white and tan. She wants the impossible from him: to know when to take the initiative, when to submit. She has achieved this fine-tuned behaviour with his predecessors; she lets him know that she considers him capable of developing a more intuitive set of responses, too.
He heels with only the subtlest show of reluctance. He will work out, she thinks.
At the place where the trail crosses the dirt road, a pickup truck approaches, half-ton, dusty green. Her cousin Sim’s daughter, Donna. She waits, and Donna slows, pauses the truck. Her dog, a cousin to this one, jumps around in the bed, barks a greeting. Donna ignores him. She’s a big woman, beefy forearm out the window, man’s T-shirt, red hair dusted with grey. In her forties now. It was clear when she was nine or ten she’d be the one to take on the farm.
Goin’ to town, she says. Need anything?
No. Not today.
Donna nods, releases the clutch; the truck moves on.
They are keeping an eye on her. They don’t like her to walk out alone. But everybody walks out alone.
She has told Sim that she is training the dog, that it will learn to go for help. This is only half true.
HER DAUGHTER MERCEDES on the telephone asks, Are you painting?
Yes, she says, briefly. She doesn’t mention the yellow-ivory of the morning, the daubing she’s been doing since. Pale yellow-creams; how to put those on the canvas, fine, but then to convey that other sense. What it is, that’s the problem. Bitter alumroot, locoweed, cinquefoil flat like woodcuts, starry death-camas. Death or life? How are cream, pale yellow, dead? Bone, ivory, waxy pallor. But bone isn’t bone: Here on the rangeland it’s blue-grey, fissured, lichened – bone of cattle becoming stone. Maybe that’s it, the complement. But she’s over-thinking it; she hasn’t done it right, yet: hasn’t sucked it up into her bones, her marrow, the places she works from.
Getting ready for the show? Mercedes asks.
Maybe, she says. Drags herself inside from a great distance. How Mercedes in her adolescent years shouted at her: You are not a supportive mother. Her mind edging out the side door, suddenly Not Home, surprising even herself. Now Mercedes just waits. What goes on in her head?
How’s the knee? Mercedes asks.
It’s been sore, the rain. Nothing too bad, though. (It’s her hands that pain her, though she does not mention this. Why not?)
Are you taking the glucosamine?
It’s a health call then. Mercedes giving her the checkup by phone. But no: Mercedes asks, now: Did you get the toilet fixed?
She has to think back for that one, a couple of weeks ago, but yes: trip to the hardware store; replaced the handle. Everyday thing, just happened to mention it once. Not health, then: general check-in. Her daughter’s mind moving through her house, the fact of her body, remotely, robot investigator, those spider-spies in the movie she saw a few years back. Prying open the eyelid. Discovering the intention, crimes not yet committed. Perhaps that’s what Mercedes is looking for. She will need to be cautious. But Mercedes has moved on, now, her voice changing timbre.
So, she says.
Now is it going to be an announcement or request? Either fork leads to the minefields. She makes herself go still, listens to the suddenly stiff leather bag of her lungs. Expand, contract. Expand.
After fifty years, still this clumsy dance. But still speaking: She ought to be grateful for that, she supposes. She has a vision now of Mercedes leaving for school, her pleated skirt blooming stiffly around her thighs, her hair, oak-coloured, bound in braids, sun picking out the golds and reds, her lifted chin: Goodbye, Mother Dear. At five already a fortress, a small tower, cloistered, self-sufficient. Herself dressed in similar stiffness, tailored slacks, fitted shirt, beehive hair. Waiting for the child to round the corner, to be out of sight, waiting to return to the washing of her matched dinnerware, the ironing of jeans and socks, the carefully plotted world with its clear clean rules, where her mind could float safely, tethered.
Mercedes in her teens, the lights of her bedroom on at two in the morning. What woke her to that? A sound, maybe.
Her daughter’s sallow face, hair scraped back painfully, the hairline and chin angry with pustules and scabby sores, looking up from her textbooks.
I’m okay, Mother.
Her colleagues had talked about their adolescent children in terms of drugs, dropping out, running away. Her daughter in her high room, its small window, disciplining herself, making straight As, the yearly awards, valedictorian, the scholarship, the dean’s list. She had been, so clearly, okay. Herself in school then, too, painfully disciplining her hand, her eye; finding the doorway into her own thoughts.
Mercedes venturing her inner life, asking for a favour, so rarely, and always awkwardly. She herself always means to be more open, more generous, but is never prepared. Both of them stiff, ungracious. She always says the wrong thing: She knows that. But her daughter obscures, misdirects: not in a cloud of vagueness – she’s used to that, she knows lots of artists who do that – but somehow in the middle of sounding focused and business-like and pragmatic.
She’s always caught off guard; she’s always lured down the wrong pathway, in these conversations with Mercedes: always ambushed. You don’t understand.
Mercedes says, So, and she says, Yes, warily, and knows that she’s already taken the step in the wrong direction, is already, somehow, doomed.
She has been standing in the kitchen, but remembers that the phone is cordless, strolls to the sun porch, settles herself in the old armchair, first lifting the cat out of the seat. Cat hair but she has on old clothes, it doesn’t matter. The porch is east-facing, catches the morning sun, as a porch should. The house she had designed to her own specifications: the right proportion of rooms, of windows; the right alignment for light. Light for waking, for gardening, for painting. Walls to block the plateau wind. The house fits her needs. She gathers it around herself, carapace, prepares herself to be found wanting.
She’s at her daughter’s mercy now. Who had told her? Judith. Now the phone calls come regularly, the intrusions, the attempts to dislodge her.
She has tried to be canny. Her upcoming show has proved a good excuse – a decoy. She has some more work to do for it. She needs the studio.
Mercedes had argued about weakness and falling and danger and worry, about causing others distress. She had answered: I don’t want to move. How quavery her voice had been that day. But it suited her, now, to have it sound so.
Her pause, her huge sigh. Finding some old truculence to dress it up, like pickles from the root cellar shelf. Not too much. Don’t overdo. If I must, I must, she had said. Then, and this was crucial: I need a couple of months. To sort papers. To get ready for the show. To find a home for the dog. (A genuine raw spot, when she thought of the dog.)
It had worked. She is good at this. She should have made an effort to learn it much earlier in her life.
Now she must pay for her three months’ grace with Mercedes’ regular check-ins. But that is a condition she can cope with.
I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU, Hal had said.
And: I could fit you in my cupped hands. Putting out his hands to show, long as her feet. He was all long bones and angles, Hal. Like a folding yardstick. A jackknife.
He was like anything made to compact itself and pretend not to take up its proper amount of space. Collapsible chairs, tent trailers, Murphy beds. What was it she had seen the other week in Canadian Tire? Collapsible silicone colanders, for straining vegetables. The colours had appealed to her: turquoise, coral, moss green. She wanted one of each. But the idea of it being flat, popping out. Collapsible things catch and pinch the fingers, in the folding. And they are mean, ungenerous objects. Intended to be frugal, what they do is cheat, try to squeeze more into a space than is justified. They don’t want to pay for the space they take up. They want something for nothing.
Hal, renting a U-Haul whenever they moved: always a size too small. Then wanting to leave things behind, not to make a second trip across town. Her things, mostly. Things she valued. You don’t want that, pointing to her grandmother’s chair, her easel, a table she used for potting plants. What she had left behind: collections of shells, doll furniture, boxes of fabric scraps she intended for making magnificently textured and coloured wall hangings. Her mother’s Limoges plaques, Stations of the Cross, not that she cared so much for them, but they had been her mother’s. Books and books and books.
He did not want her to take up space.
Why had she agreed? (She’d learned not to agree; she’d argued, for some of it.) She had tried to make herself fit. She’d jettisoned pieces of herself, left them behind.
There, there. What does it matter, now? What would she want back, now, that she hasn’t been able to replace? Or couldn’t replace, if she wanted?
Her shoes, maybe. She’d had a fabulous collection, vintage. Whenever she was in a new city: off to the second-hand stores, the Anglican rummage sales, the flea markets. (Such disparaging names, but she remembers these places always as being housed in places of high architecture, dim halls with arches and buttresses, coffered ceilings, thickly carved moldings. Halls of the dim past, layered with the dust of a more munificent time. Treasure halls.) And for her collection of shoes, with a size five foot, she’d been able to pick up gems, hand-tooled leather, colours of pre-Raphaelite paintings, often nearly unworn, still in their original boxes. You can’t find shoes like that anymore. Not here.
And the one thing that had come back to her: her grandmother’s chair, the armchair in her sun porch. But that’s another story.
Hal said: I want to put you on a watch fob. I want to wear you on a chain. I want to keep you in a little gilt birdcage.
She had thought he meant her size. He was a foot taller than she was. She had not been paying enough attention.
She had pushed the buggy with the second baby, Tommy, to the school in the mornings and again in the afternoons. You did this when your children were very small, but not later. She had learned the rules. She had cut her hair like the other women and worn clothes like theirs, pedal pushers from April to October, pleated trousers from October to March, with fitted blouses and jackets. The T-shirt had not been invented, except for little boys and labouring men, and jeans were called dungarees and not permitted at school. There were some women, some of the mothers, for that was their context of their coming together, who wore longish tweedy skirts and braids pinned to their heads. There were women, especially a couple of years later, when her second child started school, who wore their hair long and ironed flat, and skirts halfway up their thighs. These women it was important to stand back from, to ignore.
This all taught her by Hal. She had allowed it. Had wanted to leave behind the ranch, to fit into another world.
When her chance at freedom had come, she had not been careful or kind. Had not been prescient.
SIM DROPS BY with his grandson Corey: They will install her new automatic gate. The old gate has a motor, but it’s a Rube Goldbergian contraption she built herself: a garage door opener with a pulley mounted on a tall post, the swing gate not functioning in deep snow or wind, both of which are plentiful up in these hills.
Sim is often helpful.
Her mother had left her this piece of land that she was supposed to sell back to her cousins – it had been carved out of the main ranch – but she did not. It had a good building site, a stream, a stand of fir. She had built a house on it, commuted into town to teach for ten years, until she retired. It should be Sim’s land, but he is gracious, and helpful.
Sim unbolts and drags away the old gate. Corey is not helpful. He is a big boy, but mentally handicapped. He capers, chatters, asks questions, but can’t seem to see where he could lend a hand. Even the simplest effort. She sees that Sim has brought him along not as a helper, but to give Judith some space, to get Corey out from underfoot for the morning.
Corey is the son of Sim’s son Ken, who married a cousin. That is supposed to be a bad thing.
Now Sim is digging out the old pulley post, fifteen feet high, with a crossbeam near the top, like a gibb
et, she thinks. He digs out its foundation. She calls Corey and the dog to come stand by her while Sim pushes the post over.
She had put it in herself. How? She walks over, tries to hoist the post with its crossbar, out of curiosity, but Sim rushes to her, lifts it onto his own shoulder, drags it toward the truck. She watches him walk toward the truck, the post with its crossbar bending him over.
Sim is a decade younger than she, still in young, hale old age.
She grew up with him, but it is still great kindness he shows her. He is her second cousin. And also, she suspects, her half-brother. His hand on Corey’s shoulder, the gentleness. They are a family that does not touch. She does not think Sim has ever touched her, except to hand her down from his truck at the hospital. But then even her children do not touch her.
THE NURSE AT THE EME RGENCY ROOM: Veronika. She was very young, her skin over her snowplow cheekbones and around her eyes taut and fine-pored and dewy: rose-petal. Accented English. She had moved unhurriedly, ceremonially, had made her preparations, arranged the little packages on the tray, the graceful swoop of her fingers, the cupping of her hands as she aligned the objects revealing a deep slow pleasure in the activity. She had drawn up and sat on a stool, her knees pressing up against Lilah’s, had pulled on gloves that were thin and supple as the sloughed skin of salamanders, had taken Lilah’s chin between her left thumb and forefinger as if handling porcelain. Slowly, ceremoniously, she had opened packet after packet of gauze, dabbed. The dabbing had stung, but lightly, like small shocks. It had come away burnt sienna, carmine, rose-madder. Lilah was being painted. She was the canvas.
Veronika had dabbed and dabbed, lightly, delicately. She used the corners of the gauze to take out grit; she leaned forward, her eyes wide and intent, her lips soft, parted.
She cleaned Lilah’s face, then her gouged palms. She brushed on ointment; she pressed to Lilah’s skin, with her fine translucent fingertips, the adhesive wings of butterfly bandages. She took Lilah’s blood pressure again, her fingers moving in a graceful wave pattern even as she squeezed the bulb, as she listened through her stethoscope. The diaphragm of the stethoscope was a gold coin pressed to Lilah’s arm, for luck.
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