by Joan Clark
The Bloodied Cross
As Easter approaches, Christians should rethink the symbol of the cross and what it stands for. Does it stand for war or peace? Why do we read scripture in a church that praises the Lord for drowning the Egyptians? It’s true that if the Lord hadn’t drowned the Egyptians, they would have slain the Jews. But that was then and this is now.
When we contemplate the Cross, we are contemplating the death of a man who was nailed to a wooden beam. Murdered. Jesus didn’t die from natural causes. He didn’t die from pestilence or pneumonia; he didn’t waste away in a leper colony or spew his insides into a bowl. His death was protracted, horrific, public and memorable and its symbol of cruelty is everywhere: on churches and altars and graves; on earrings and pendants and T-shirts. Jesus told people to love one another, to forgive one another, so why do we use a symbol of violent death?
Do Christians want to stand for violence and war? I don’t think so. We live in a world besieged by the violence of terrorism, famine, genocide, poverty, sickness and war, and if Christians want to change the world for the better, they should banish the use of a violent symbol and replace it with a peaceful fish. Think how much more beautiful our churches would be with fish on spires and altars, fish of all kinds, from the lowly sardine to the whale. Think of the countless ways rainbow colours could be used. Think of Jesus feeding the multitudes by sharing bread and fish. Think of ways to make the church more sharing and inclusive in today’s world. Then consider honouring Christ’s death at Easter with the kindlier symbol of the fish.
PART V
SIXTEEN
BUN WILL SOON BE leaving for Newfoundland. The ships in bottles are wrapped in newspapers and stored inside one of the sturdy plastic bins he keeps in the truck for his journeys across the Strait. Bun sells his work in ferry gift shops, never asking more than a hundred dollars a ship and the bottles will be sold before the tourist season is underway. Since finishing the ships, he’s been working around the property, painting the back step and outdoor furniture, sawing felled trees into carving pieces—in addition to the pine, he’s taken down a spruce and a fir. He’s pruned the apple and cherry trees, split kindling and firewood, chopped up the old boat. Because he enjoys working outdoors, none of these chores have seemed like work.
He and Moranna put in the garden together, hoeing and raking the furrows before transferring the seedlings from the window shelves to the warming soil. By now the budding fruit trees have a meadow smell and the early strawberries are in bloom. Moranna loves spring, the voles stirring beneath last year’s leaves, the release of water, the pink worms tunnelling through soil. After a long winter, the earth is opening up and so is she.
Following the Farmer’s Almanac schedule, Moranna plants potatoes, turnips and carrots on the dark side of the moon, and lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage, corn on the light side. Like making her own bread, planting vegetables has become a necessity for her and she attributes much of her improved health to eating a balanced diet free of chemical sprays. Rather than poison the slug eating a cabbage, she will carry it across the road and leave it on the same beach rocks where she releases the mice she catches in a contraption made from scraps of wood. “I don’t want you eating my vegetables so you’ll have to take your chances over here,” she’ll say to the slug, “It’s better than having your tiny brain poisoned.” Bun has heard her advising snails, ants, bees, and worms about the necessity of avoiding pesticides. Except for wasps, most bugs that come her way receive advice on how to avoid becoming contaminated. “Life in Baddeck isn’t so bad,” she tells them. “It’s far better you live here than near the Sydney tar ponds.”
The morning before Bun’s departure, Moranna dons the costume she wears during tourist season, the outfit her brother loathes but which she insists is good for business. Beneath a pink satin bathrobe she wears a red lace blouse over a plain T-shirt, a MacKenzie kilt, tartan knee socks, and on her head a purple wig. She’s eccentric, so why not profit from it? Some day she’ll write a sermon about how poorly eccentrics are tolerated in society, how conformist North Americans are, how obsessed they are with body image and being ultra thin—once she gets going, she’ll have a lot to say.
Moranna sits on a bench on the veranda in her costume, Ari van Woek’s dummy on one side of her and Brian Mulroney’s on the other. The dummies, which she put together several years ago as a tourist attraction and have been stored in the barn all winter, amuse her. Putting a chummy arm around Brian, she smiles at Bun’s camera. Many people claim they hate Mulroney, but Moranna has no more of a gripe against him than she has against politicians in general. It so happened the day she went into the pharmacy, it was Mulroney’s mask being sold half-price along with the Halloween costumes.
Using a disposable camera, Bun shoots all twelve pictures. Before boarding the ferry, he’ll drop off the film for developing and later Moranna will choose two photos to send to a printer in Sydney to be made into postcards. She’s decided to sell postcards this summer for a dollar apiece instead of charging admission. Most of the tourists who drop in browse without buying anything and she wants to pick up a few dollars from them to make up for the nuisance factor. She doesn’t like tourists much and, when they arrive, she usually sits on the veranda reading a newspaper so she can keep an eye on them without becoming engaged in profitless conversation. If people appear interested in buying, she puts the newspaper aside and tells them the wooden people stories passed on by Hettie, but she doesn’t bother telling them to visitors who are only looking for a way of killing time. The tourist business is overrun by people bored with themselves, which Moranna never is, and any smart businesswoman has to be able to weed them out.
The night before he leaves, Bun grills potatoes and fresh Atlantic salmon that he and Moranna eat outdoors, sitting on the newly painted chairs. It’s still jacket weather, but they enjoy being outside where they can admire what Moranna calls the fruits of their labours, meaning the garden with the woods behind. Bun, who for weeks has been patiently waiting for Moranna to tell him her plans, asks if she intends to go to Bonnie’s wedding. Usually Moranna talks non-stop about her plans, but on this subject she has been remarkably silent.
Peeling the skin from the salmon, she says, “I’m definitely going to Halifax, but I’m not sure about attending the wedding.”
“Why? I can’t see you being stopped by the fact that you haven’t been invited.”
“I don’t want to do anything that will set me up for failure. I don’t want to make any more serious mistakes.” Moranna has been thinking about this a lot. “If I crash the wedding, I might do something to spoil the chance of meeting my daughters.” She picks up the salmon tail and crunches it between her teeth. “I’ll decide after I get to Halifax.”
“Do you want me to go with you? I’ve got enough seniority to book off the time.”
“I have to go on my own, Bun. I have to prove I can do it alone.”
“I’m talking about driving you there and back. The rest you can do on your own.”
Moranna concentrates on eating the potatoes. When she’s finished, she says, “Do you remember how I wanted to travel around the world?”
“How could I forget?”
Moranna reminds Bun that after she met him, she stopped riding the ferries and didn’t go anywhere, except to Fox Harbour to meet his mother, because she thought by living a quiet life and sticking to her routines, she could make herself better, and she has—the voice was long gone. She says it’s time she found out how much better she really is, and she won’t find that out if she’s leaning on Bun. “For most of my life I’ve been leaning on someone, my father, my brother …”
Bun is about to assure her that she can lean on him all she wants, but he stops himself. One of the reasons their arrangement has worked out as well as it has is because they don’t suck the breath out of one another. He has seen Moranna in her dark moods often enough to know she needs a lot of breathing space. If she flipped again, he wouldn’t de
sert her, but he would have to keep a certain distance between them. Setting his plate on the grass, he stretches his legs in front of him and looks at the clouds drifting toward the lake. “You’re right,” he says. “It’s important for you to do it alone.”
After Bun leaves for Newfoundland, Moranna will sometimes nose-dive into a depression, have trouble getting out of bed in the mornings, skip meals and neglect changing her clothes. But not this time, this time his departure is little more than a blip because every waking hour her mind is occupied with Bonnie’s wedding, which is only three weeks away. She has already made a reservation at the Waverly Inn and has been mulling over what she will wear for the occasion. She has decided to buy new clothes and has been poring over catalogue pictures for days, choosing one outfit and then another and another. The ankle-length, sleeveless cotton dress in red ochre, worn with a pair of cork sandals, is the conservative outfit someone watching the wedding party from a discreet distance would wear. The champagne-coloured suit with the satin collar and buttons and slit skirt, worn with high-heeled strap sandals that show off her legs—she still has terrific legs—is an elegant outfit the mother of the bride would wear when seated at the front of the church. The most dramatic outfit is the floor-length Randi May strapless gown in black and white, set off by a reversible stole. With the broad-brimmed black hat she wore at her father’s funeral, no one would think of questioning her about whether she had been invited.
Because she hasn’t decided whether she’ll remain outside the church or go inside, she’ll take all three outfits to Halifax with her and decide which one she’ll wear on the wedding day. She doesn’t want to narrow her choices too soon and undergo the anxiety of forcing a decision before she’s ready. Moranna is determined to proceed carefully, to avoid doing something impetuous and rash. The day Bun leaves, she goes to the village and places her Sears catalogue order. She could have ordered by telephone but prefers to point to the exact outfits she wants so there will be no mistake. Ordering the outfits and new underwear, not to mention a watch, is a full-blown extravagance for Moranna, who seldom spends money. As an afterthought, she orders a small shoulder purse—she can hardly carry an old sock to the wedding.
Returning from the village, she imagines herself in the Randi May, walking down the church aisle on the arm of an usher and being seated with the relatives assembled for wedding. Beside her in the pew is a prune-faced witch with scarlet claws and a heavily lipsticked mouth. The woman turns sideways and squints, trying to place the stunning woman sitting beside her. Who can she be? She is somehow familiar yet the witch is certain she has never seen her before.
Davina, sitting beside Murdoch and Ginger in the pew directly in front, turns her head sideways, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious woman behind her but cannot look closely without gawking in an unseemly way. Later, when the guests stand as the wedding party makes its way down the aisle, Bonnie and Brianna look at Moranna with radiant smiles, and at that precise moment Davina recognizes who she is.
Moranna telephones a Halifax florist and orders two wedding bouquets, one for Bonnie and another for Brianna, who, she’s already assumed, will be the maid of honour. The florist says the custom is for the groom to order the bride’s bouquet, a custom Moranna ignores as she continues describing the bouquets she wants made from field daisies, buttercups, bluebells, columbine. When the florist exclaims that requests for wildflower bouquets are highly unusual and will require extra effort and expense, Moranna says grandly, “Money’s no object. Tell me the amount and I’ll send you a postal order.” She doesn’t own a chequebook or a credit card but takes money as needed from the cellar where she keeps a stash of bills inside a butter churn. She tells the florist the bouquets are to be delivered on the wedding day morning to the groom’s brother’s, whose house number on South Street she already obtained from the church office. Moranna is using the bouquets to signal her daughters that she isn’t in an asylum or dead but is very much alive. In the absence of communication all these years, she yearns to receive a signal from them, a word, a letter, a gesture, anything that acknowledges they know she is their mother, but for now all she allows herself to hope for is that Bonnie and Brianna will receive her signal.
There is one last thing to do before she’s ready for the trip. Climbing the stairs to the dusty attic, she paws through the cobwebbed clutter for an old leather grip she remembered seeing up there. Wrestling the grip downstairs, she wipes it clean and rubs the leather until it shines like a new chestnut. Then she puts it beneath the bed and, going outside, settles down to work—now that the weather is warmer, she’s carving outdoors.
She’s sitting on the bottom veranda step one morning, the cedar stump between her knees, when Murdoch drives up. It’s the first time he’s come to see her since she turned down the developer’s offer. For the past hour, she’s been searching for the ancient face of Niall of the Squalls in the stump among the tangle of roots and brown wood. The colour of the wood reminds her of a picture she once saw of a bog man found in Denmark. He had a rope around his neck and a serene expression on his face as if he was dreaming himself a peaceful death. In all likelihood, Niall’s life would have been precarious and short, and Moranna wants to give him a face as inscrutable and calm as the bogman’s.
“I see you’re carving dwarves,” her brother says.
“Very funny.” Moranna puts down the chisel and offers him tea. The tea is leftover from breakfast but still warm enough to drink.
They drink their tea sitting on the top step facing the driveway, Moranna admiring the bottle-green ferns, which are all that remain of her grandmother’s front garden; Murdoch admiring the newly painted bench. He asks if she remembers the store he made from benches when he was a boy.
“It was when Mother was alive. You were probably too young to remember.”
As a boy, Murdoch always referred to their mother as Mom. Moranna has never heard him use the word “Mother,” and hearing him use it now made the word seem formal and stiff, as if her brother has moved their mother an even greater distance away from them than she already was. She wonders if she has been moved as great a distance from the children who once called her Mama.
“I put one bench on top of the other and covered them with curtains. Or maybe it was a tablecloth. Mother let me have an egg cup to hold change. On the shelves I hoarded cookies and chocolate bars, an orange and apple, a square of gingerbread Mother made.”
“I don’t remember her baking.”
“When she was feeling good, she baked. And she made fudge. I had fudge in the store too. She would give us each a piece and you would eat yours right away, but I would save mine and put it in the store.” Murdoch pauses. “You ate mine too. In fact, you ate pretty well everything in my store except the apple bought by our neighbour, Mrs. Lockhart.”
“The woman with the bottle collection in the window.”
“I don’t remember the bottle collection. What I remember is that I had no other customers except her and you.”
“And I don’t suppose I had any money.”
“I sold you the merchandise on credit, but you never paid me.”
Moranna laughs. “I’ll bet you remember how much it was.”
“Seventeen cents.”
On impulse Moranna goes into the kitchen and shakes seventeen cents from the money sock and brings it back to her brother. “Here,” she says. “We’re even.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Murdoch says, which is as far as he can go without causing offence to make the point that his sister owes him far more than a measly seventeen cents. It gripes him how much he and their father have given Moranna over the years without receiving so much as a thank you in return. But why is he nursing a grudge on a lovely spring day when he’s come all this way to give his sister some interesting news? He could have telephoned the news but with Davina away all day working on a decorating job, he wanted to get out of the house.
“I came to tell you I’ve located Mother’s sister,” M
urdoch says, “her name’s Tessa McWeeny and as far as I can make out she lives in California.”
Moranna has completely forgotten she told Murdoch what the woman in Frizzleton once said about their mother’s sister.
“Ever since I got e-mail I’ve been searching the Internet on and off to see if I could trace her, and late last night I found her. She was an exotic dancer like you said. Tessa the Temptress, she’s called on a History of Burlesque website,” Murdoch recites. “Born Tessa McWeeny in Canada in 1926. There was no date indicating she died so she must be alive. I worked it out, she’d be seventy-five. There was a photo of her on the website showing her in her heyday. She was certainly a looker. Dark hair piled on top of her head, bedroom eyes …”
“Bedroom eyes. I didn’t think you knew what they were, Murdoch.”
“Long legs. Big bosoms.”
“Big bosoms.” Moranna teases him. “What are they?”
“She was wearing a feathery costume.”
“Did the website give her address?”
Murdoch explains that the website gave a kind of a history of exotic dancing in the San Francisco area and he supposes Tessa lives there. He says he’ll ask Ginger if it’s possible to track down her address, that if anyone knows how, it’ll be Ginger, who has the Internet stuff down cold. Murdoch seldom brags about Ginger’s accomplishments, not wanting to rub it in that he’s in touch with his daughter, while his sister is estranged from hers.