Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  Structure determines function. Life does come down to its basics.

  I hear cars again. The world is going on without me. I have to punch air, kick my leg, ward off clots. I miss solving my crossword in the morning. I miss eating a tuna sandwich while standing at the kitchen counter. I never stood for meals until after Harry died, and now I rarely sit. I miss hearing the news, flicking the switch on my radio, the dial set to CBC. I miss having a bath. I miss my ordinary day.

  The best walks Harry and I had were in the fall when the trees in the ravine burst into glorious blaze. I often wished I had learned to play the trumpet so that I could stand beneath the showiest tree and blow my horn on its behalf. I think of Satchmo, out of breath. Or Buddy Bolden on his cornet. Or Jelly Roll Morton, wheeling a piano down the root-strewn path playing “Jelly Roll Blues.” I think of Rice strumming his guitar on Case’s summer stage, soft and easy, a sound that makes you want to curl up under a canopy of branches.

  I miss jazz at suppertime. I miss the way I settle in to close each day. Rice told me my radio doesn’t have good sound, but to my ears it’s fine. Anyway, I have a CD player in my bedroom, compliments of Case. But the kitchen is where I spend my time; my radio connects me, assures that I’m one with my country. It isn’t until nighttime that I begin to have doubts.

  I don’t watch television because TV images are frightening, damaging, terror-laden. They make people take sides, one extreme or another. After 9/11, I watched TV day and night until I could take no more. Harry couldn’t pry me away from the screen. I wanted to understand but could not. I sat on the chesterfield and on the third day began to cry and thought I would never stop. Harry turned off the TV and brought me my jacket and we walked out the back door in silence, and down a steep trail into the ravine. We passed this very spot. A terrible thing had happened and the new world was carrying on. A couple of years later, Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in Iraq in a shootout and, a day after that, the stock market in New York began to revive. Who pretends to understand? To think that Grandfather gave his life to one war and Harry was wounded in the next, and each prayed that his war would be the last.

  I just realized that on Wednesday, the 19th of April, the day of the Birthday Lunch—whether it’s come or gone—the Queen will be the only person in the whole world who will know that I am missing.

  THIRTY

  I have a narrow view of heaven from here, a V-shaped opening between trees. A wisp of cloud drifts past, a mouth with open lips spewing smoke. If I squint to block the trees, I hang from the wisp of cloud, drift on the thread of smoke.

  I regret to say that I began to smoke—a cigarette here and there, nothing serious or deadly—during the months that followed Harry’s death. I had begun to find things. I drove down the hill and bought a pack of Benson & Hedges at one of those ugly strip malls that have sprung up around the edge of town. I lit the first while standing at the kitchen window and blew smoke out through the screen, not wanting to rebreathe it later. I can still bring back the floating sensation after the first pull into the lungs, the dizziness, the body sensing that it is off-kilter. I stowed the cigarettes in the freezer, in case I needed further propping up.

  I found unexpected things.

  Strands of black wool that had fallen from the fringes of Grand Dan’s shawl, which I inherited after her death. The more I wore the shawl, the more the fringe fell from its edges. I left the pieces where they dropped because I loved the idea of moving about the planet and dispersing something created by Grand Dan. Separately and individually, each strand might have resembled a three-inch black worm but, for me, each was a deposition of love. During the Big Trip, I tightened the shawl around my shoulders while I stood on a battlefield at the Somme and honoured a grandfather I’d never met. I shredded the War Office telegram Grand Dan had received in 1916 and scattered its bloodstained pieces in a farmer’s field. The next day, I wrapped the shawl around me at Vimy Ridge and traced my grandfather’s carved name with my fingertips while I cried for all of us. I wore it in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Cyprus and Greece. It sheltered me in airplanes, airports, taxicabs, trams and, one hot summer later, on a ferry in Seattle. Wherever I travelled, I left bits of Grand Dan behind.

  But after Harry died, I discovered a soft, wormy nest of those same pieces in the bottom drawer of a desk in his basement workroom. As the wool had fallen, so had Harry followed and gathered it up. I felt betrayed. I wanted those bits of Grand Dan and the stains of her blood to be left on black earth that had roiled over the shattered pieces of my grandfather’s body. I wanted them left on a bench worn smooth in a foreign metro, or stuck to a fence surrounding a dogs’ park in Geneva, or snagged on the slit seat of a Roman bus, or caught in slivers of boardwalk beside the Ligurian Sea. A bird with yellow wings might have flown off with a strand to line a nest. A Greek gardener with leathery hands might have used one to tie a tomato plant, or to support an olive branch. But Harry had followed me, and thwarted these acts of my imagination.

  This should not have surprised me. He once tracked me on a crowded beach after I went for a walk. He could identify my footprints in the sand. If he were alive today and knew I was missing, he’d find me in a minute. He was expert at observing the smallest detail; it was as if his eyes had begun to magnify without the loupe. When I looked for messages in the sand, all I could see were cross-hatches of heel and toe prints. How could anyone separate one set of tracks from an entire human medley?

  Harry could. Harry was a tracker.

  He was also a hoarder.

  Other items found after his death: a soft-sided black diary, palm-sized, which he had kept when he was single during the thirties, after he’d left the Dixon farm and moved to town. The diary listed every job he worked at before joining up. I read and reread the entries, and tried to understand the young man Harry had been before he entered my life. The first entries were from 1936 and included items such as these:

  —Three days work at canning factory.

  —Blizzards all week. Attended sleigh-riding party.

  —Dominion Day, hiked to river to attend church picnic. Long walk there, ride back to town in Ford car.

  —Threshed grain for one dollar and two meals per day.

  —Employed by CNR shovelling coal and lining track on coal dump, 25 cents per hour.

  I looked for clues. There was not a single emotional detail, only a chronicling of events that had to do with staying alive during the final years of the Depression.

  Another item: a Metropolitan Life Insurance booklet with an illustration of a child carrying a chair: When I go walking with my chair / I hold it high up in the air.

  When Case was four, Harry helped her to read the Met. Life booklets, sent to us in the mail. One booklet had illustrations of carrots, an apple, white bread and a chicken leg. Case loved it. Harry also taught her to recognize the countries of the world on a large map that hung on our kitchen wall. I have not yet come across the map.

  More findings.

  Inside a narrow box, a row of discarded boots, paired as if a bevy of feet might someday arrive to slip them on.

  Six heels from old shoes, stuffed into a plastic container with a lid.

  A canister labelled “Things that tie.” Inside were neatly rolled pouches of string, tangles of used shoelaces, and yellow skatelaces flecked with black.

  Pantyhose legs cut into strips for tying runner beans.

  Paper bags filled with seeds.

  Paper bags filled with pods.

  A cigar box packed with rotted elastic bands. These lifted out as one solid piece and gave off a rancid odour.

  A second cigar box filled with green tie tapes stored in clusters of ten, with an eleventh tape bound around the middle of each cluster. I threw them out immediately and tried not to dwell on this discovery. Each middle tie represented a mean little twist, and I wondered at which point in his life Harry had saved them.

  It was as if he had stored these items against an expected day when his belo
ngings would be stolen or forcefully taken from him. I thought of the times he’d been sorrowful and moody. I thought of him making deliberate moves to protect his hidden goods, all labelled and secreted away. I raised my head and spoke to Lilibet in the thinning air. “Do you think it’s possible that I married my father?”

  I began to worry about what else I would find. I told myself that Harry had been a Home Child; he’d lived in a shed throughout his childhood; he’d owned nothing, not even a pair of laces. Were these the hoardings of the same man who, one evening after work, stood outside and, seeing me at the window holding up our toddler, jumped into the air and clicked his heels? The leap lasted only a moment, but what a sight! Case clapped her hands and called for more.

  Harry, I hardly knew ye.

  THIRTY-ONE

  There was more.

  A cache of photos hidden beneath the hinged lid of Harry’s bedside table. It took a while to get to this discovery, because a brass lamp sat on top of the table, undisturbed. After Harry’s death, it was a long time before I looked inside.

  He must have waited until I was out of the house to inspect or add to his cache. He’d have had to lift the lamp, place it on the floor, have enough time to get the photos out and back in again. He chose his hiding place well, because I found the photos only months after his death. I was thinking of donating the table to the Sally Ann, removed the lamp, raised the lid and there was Harry’s version of family, inside. I spent the rest of the afternoon in our room, trying to recreate an order he might have seen. It was a celebration of the people he loved.

  This is my understanding, my glimpse of family seen through Harry’s eyes.

  At the top of the heap was his first family, the brother and sister who had been lost to him when he was a boy. Verna and Gordo had also been Home Children, and had tried to trace Harry’s whereabouts for more than half a century. They finally found him—found us—on a snowy night one Canadian winter. Unannounced, the two of them and Verna’s husband, Arman, walked through our front door on the seventh of December, the night of Harry’s sixty-fifth birthday. It was the same year Harry and I took our Big Trip.

  The tracker had been tracked.

  Until the knock on the door, Harry had convinced himself that the only relatives he had were Case, me, and the ones I had brought to the family. Despite being told, when he was seven, that a brother and sister had preceded him to Canada, he’d been too young for the information to sink in as reality. It was one more painful story that might have belonged to some other orphan. He had fleeting memories of numerous children, many possible brothers and sisters. He did not own a single photograph from his childhood. The most he could dredge up from the past was a blurred and upsetting memory of a woman lying in her bed, reaching towards him but unable to speak, the day he was taken away and put in the Home.

  When Verna and Gordo entered our lives, they blew in like a singular pent-up wind. Once past the front door, they claimed Harry and he agreed to be claimed. What I saw was a large woman who introduced herself and shouted into the room, “It’s our little Harry!” as she rushed forward. Their brother Gordo stood in our living room and wept. Harry did not drop dead from shock but his legs shook and he was forced to sit down. My legs were shaking, too, because of the excitement.

  First impressions.

  Harry, Gordo and Verna looked alike, a shocking surprise. From the side, their profiles were identical. I was married to one of what appeared to be triplets, each at a different stage in life. Harry was the youngest.

  Phil said, later, when she met Verna and Gordo, “Put a toque on them, pull it down over their ears, turn them sideways and you won’t know one from another. You won’t even know male from female.”

  Verna and Gordo had been lucky enough to find each other when they were in their twenties. They’d been reunited in Alberta, the province to which they’d been sent as Home Children. Verna had lived on a farm near High River. Before the abdication, she’d even seen the Prince of Wales during one of his visits to his EP Ranch. All of this came out during our first meeting.

  Both Verna and Gordo had moved east and eventually found partners whom they married, but they never lost their determination to track down their younger brother. They hit dead ends until Verna heard about and contacted an agency called The Missing Link. It was this organization that traced a path back to the archival records of the now defunct Home in England, and learned the area of Ontario to which Harry had been sent. Not long after that, three strangers claiming to be close relatives arrived at our door, unannounced, wild winds blowing.

  As it turned out, Verna lived not far away, only a two-hour drive from Wilna Creek. She had owned a gift shop for many years, and sold her own handicrafts in a village close to Highway 7. She smelled of vodka and pepper, had a large body and a low, resonant voice. Arman was her third husband; she’d outlived the other two. Arman was younger than Verna by ten years, a chunkily built Russian with a thin beard. He had come to Canada by way of Hungary in 1956 and loved his new country. He was tight and muscular and was forever tucking in his chin and looking down at his upper arms as if he expected his biceps to grow while he was watching. From the beginning, I thought of him as a wrestler, or an outdated tightrope walker. But he was a travelling salesman for paper products, and frequently stayed in motels from one end of the province to the other. He told us that the way he stayed alert while driving through his territory at night was to talk to strangers along his route. When he passed a house or farm, he spoke aloud, as if he knew the occupants: “Hello, my friend. I’m passing by. I’m coming through. I’m entering your head.” He talked to them about the events of his day, or about the sales he had made, or the quality of paper, or about music he was listening to on the car radio. Sometimes he said a short prayer, a blessing. This revived him and kept him awake at the wheel.

  Having talked to Lilibet all my life, I understood.

  While Arman was on the road, he collected plastic shower caps from motel rooms for Verna, so that she could use them as dust covers for seasonal crafts until it was time to display them in the shop. Verna was the same height as Arman, but larger. She called him “Ourman” in her deepest, lowest voice. She had picked up a hint of Russian inflection in sympathy with his native tongue, and she spoke slowly and deliberately, as if every word were a weight that had to be tested deep in her throat before it could be lifted out and used.

  Arman was quieter than Verna, but devoted to her. He was also devout. The first time he sat in our living room, he stared at a framed photograph of a curved tree against a background of river and sky and declared that he could see God. He tried to explain the outlines to the rest of us—high forehead, large eye, bumpy nose. God was right there, hovering in the upper reaches of sky. Could we not see? But no one saw what Arman saw.

  Gordo, Harry’s older brother and the middle child, was a retired draftsman who lived in Fredericton. He was the same height as Harry, thin and angular. Twice a year, winter and summer, he made the two-day car trip from New Brunswick to Ontario, to visit his sister.

  Gordo’s wife had been dead for several years and, since that time, he had lived alone. He had a “nervous stomach,” he told us, and was addicted to TUMS. Gordo had served in Intelligence during the war, and this affected the way he viewed the world ever after. He was alert but suspicious. He was also a man of firsts. He announced during his first visit that he took a bath the first day of every month, whether he needed it or not. He told us that during his first trip to the Maritimes, years after the war, he visited Shediac, where he ate his first lobster. He was attracted to the restaurant because of its design, a simple square building with porthole windows and an outdoor lean-to from which fried clams were served in summer. He had saved one bright-red claw from his plate. “I wrapped it in a serviette,” he said, “and carried it out to the car. What a day.” He added, sadly, “The claw is faded now, washed-out pink, but it’s still on my mantelpiece. It was my first.” Gordo fell in love with the Maritimes duri
ng that visit, and he and his wife moved there, and stayed on.

  Gordo’s peculiar arrangement with the world was that all objects outside himself were observed relative to the twelve o’clock position. This spatial orientation took getting used to. The first morning he woke in our house, he stood at our living-room window sipping coffee, and reported, “Man with yellow dog at eleven o’clock.”

  I knew he was talking about our neighbour, Pete. Winter or summer, Pete dressed like Paddington in a shrunken military jacket buttoned to the top, his bulging chest threatening to pop the buttons. He walked his Golden Lab twice a day. When Gordo reported the position of man and dog, Verna and Arman offered no comment. Harry and I exchanged glances. When I looked at Harry, I realized it ‘would not be easy to think of him as Gordo’s little brother. “This,” I told myself, “is family. This is my husband’s family, for better or worse.”

  After lunch—our new relatives stayed three days so that stories could be told—I served tea in the family room, which overlooked the backyard. Cardinals, sparrows and a pair of doves were at the feeder. Chickadees darted back and forth to the edge of the ravine. Gordo announced gravely, “Mourning dove at four.” And then, “Danger at twelve.” I looked out just as a hawk swooped down from the sky and scooped up a dove, leaving scattered feathers and pink blots on the snow. The attack happened so quickly, it was difficult to understand anything but a rage of flying feathers. I was certain the dove had died but, no, a few minutes later it limped back to the feeder. Maybe the hawk had dropped it in the snow. Maybe it had plucked up another bird in its stead and our eyes weren’t fast enough to see. The dove’s mate appeared, too, its chest puffing rapidly, in fear. I felt pity, to see the birds so frazzled, so afraid.