Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  Later, we drove down the hill to the pharmacy so that Gordo could replenish his supply of TUMS. Inside the store, he whispered, “Man stole black comb, stuffed in pocket. Check ten o’clock.”

  Harry and I picked up the thread. “Gordo listening in at six,” I whispered. And he replied, “Breathing space available at two.” It was not hard to see that Gordo was lonely.

  Despite the peculiarities, there was no disputing the fact that Harry was delighted to have a brother, a sister and a brother-in-law in his life. A ready-made family whom he loved instantly. Verna and Gordo, being older, had memories that stretched further back than his own. They knew details of their shared, early years in England before they’d become Home Children and were separated. Verna described their parents as she remembered them. Their father, she said, had blond hair and fair skin. We could not bring ourselves to speak of Matt. Not during that first encounter, though Harry and I looked at each other, panic-stricken, when his sister described their father and our son.

  Harry invited the three of them back for Christmas, and they returned two weeks later and stayed ten days, right into the New Year. Before long, we met their children and their children’s children, and after that there was a reunion every third summer, usually in our backyard overlooking the ravine. In one expansive shock, we welcomed fourteen close relatives into our lives. Case was introduced to an aunt, two uncles, five cousins and six second cousins whom none of us had ever known. Harry’s family was bigger than my own.

  Some of the photos Harry chose for his cache: Gordo, wearing a dark suit, Masonic sash and apron. When he met us, he told us he’d attended thirteen funerals the previous year, all Brethren, like himself. After our first meeting, he mailed the Masonic photo from Fredericton. He was standing beside his car, wearing a square apron with tassels and adornments over a dark suit. Not navy, but dark enough, he explained in the accompanying letter. Over one shoulder was draped a wide purple sash. I wanted to ask if the Masons’ secret handshake was a myth, a boys’ club in the woods. Harry said, as if he had known his older brother all his life, “Don’t bother. Even if such a handshake exists, Gordie will never tell.”

  The second of the photos in Harry’s cache was of Verna, her ample body being bounced on Arman’s knee. The photo was taken in our living room. She was not shy about discussing her two earlier marriages, and Arman clearly enjoyed her stories. When I examined the photo, I remembered that she had been telling us about her first marriage and the honeymoon trip to Northern Ontario by bus to see the Dionne quintuplets. I pressed her for details, and she told us that there had been a long lineup, that it was a scorching hot day, that the quints’ hair was arranged in careful ringlets. She had taken gifts to the quints, five barrettes shaped like butterflies, each a different colour and glued to a hair clip by herself. “I always had a flair for crafts, George,” she said, her deep voice dipping into story. “I pulled the barrettes out of my purse and gave them to the ticket-taker, but I’ll never know if the quints got to wear them. The ticket-taker was a real sourpuss. She probably kept them for herself.”

  One of the quints stared at Verna as if believing she might be her real mommy. Verna remembered that. She purchased a postcard before she left, and mailed it to the man who eventually became her second husband. The second husband, as it turned out, was a master pruner. After he moved in with Verna, he began to chop the bottom branches off trees in her backyard, leaving a row of spindly trunks and skinny-looking tips. When he finished those, he walked into the forest that was held at bay at the end of the yard and began to prune in earnest. Day after day, he pushed farther into the woods.

  Verna said she didn’t miss him as much as she had missed her first husband. “There wouldn’t be a tree left in the forest if he were still alive,” she said in her slow voice, which seemed to become more Russian than Arman’s as she spoke. Arman snorted. He drew Verna onto his knee and bounced her considerable weight as if to some tune of his own. It was a sight, all right. Harry snapped the photo and it became part of the cache.

  There were also photos of Case and Rice, Case at her theatre opening, Ally and me, Ally and Trick, our niece, Kathleen, who with her own family was now helping to manage the villa in Boca Raton, and Phil with Aunt Fred on Boxing Day. That one, taken the year Uncle Fred died, had also been snapped by Harry. The two sisters—both widows now—were sitting on the chesterfield in our family room, feet propped on the coffee table. They’d been listening to Mario Lanza, which Harry was playing for them on the record player, and they were showing off new mules, their annual gift to each other. Phil’s were red, Aunt Fred’s pine green. By agreement every Christmas, they threw away the old mules from the preceding year before unwrapping the new. A tinge of sadness can be detected on both faces. Although this is not in the photo, Aunt Fred whipped off one green mule after the picture was taken, and dusted the tabletop where she and Phil had just rested their feet. I remember Phil saying, as the record ended, mourning Lanza, “He died too young. I could forgive him his robust middle, but he died too young.”

  Aunt Fred was mourning her own husband. She had already begun to remind me of Lady Macbeth, not because she was an abettor or a murderess, but because she was constantly rubbing her hands. What, will these hands ne’er be clean? The line had been planted by Miss Grinfeld, and came to mind that Christmas, when my aunt’s behaviour was painfully noticeable. I remembered the younger children at school running around during recess, dangling their hands in front of one another’s faces and shouting, “Out damned spot! Out, I say!” and then running off, laughing like fools because they’d shouted the word damned with impunity in the schoolyard.

  Aunt Fred missed the bawdy jokes, the passion, the daily battles with my uncle. She missed him until the day she died. And now, I miss them both. Aunt Fred died alone in her bed.

  I gathered up Harry’s photos and began to place them back inside the bedside table. But as I did so, I saw that I had missed a flat brown packet. I lifted it out and opened it, and inside were four black-and-white photos of our lost baby: Matt in his carriage, Matt held by a pair of hands next to a window, Matt lying on his blanket. The last was of Matt in my arms, smiling at the camera.

  It was too much all at once. The grief poured out of me as if I had never mourned either Matt or Harry. I cried and cried and went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. I stayed there until the next morning.

  It was only later that I realized there hadn’t been a single photo of Harry in the cache. It was as if he had considered himself a voyeur throughout his life, looking in at his own family from outside.

  I did not send the bedside table to the Sally Ann. The photos are still under the lid, there for the next person to find.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The floodgates have opened. Grief has no end; it only transforms itself, over and over. Do grief and self-pity amount to the same thing? I have to stop this, have to start thinking of better times.

  Harry and I were happy when we went to Europe. Not on a grand tour; we made arrangements ourselves. It was such an adventure to fly—a first for both of us. As we arrived in different cities, we booked day excursions or hired a driver to take us around. Much of the time, we walked short distances or took a local bus. When we made our plans, we opened the atlas to Europe, sat back in our chairs and wondered at the possibilities—the Somme, the Austrian Tyrol, Geneva, San Remo, Athens, Rome. I wanted to go on to London, but Harry refused to return to the country that had banished him when he was a child.

  We ended our trip in Cyprus, flying in and out of Larnaca. After checking into our hotel, we asked directions to the twelfth-century church erected above the tomb of Saint Lazarus after his second death. It was said to be the resting place of some of his bones. Lazarus had lived an extra thirty years after his first death, and had been a close friend of Christ. Who would not want to see such a place?

  The air was hot and dry the day of our visit and we were suffering from the heat. Harry paid the fee and we were handed
two jagged scraps of paper. We jammed these into our pockets and slowly entered the shadows of the small church, all golds and blues—even the pulpit. There was no one else inside. We were cocooned, and could no longer hear sounds from without.

  I saw a photograph of an icon taped to a table near the entrance, and looked up to see the icon itself—the resurrection of Lazarus. A round-eyed, angry-looking, mummified but haloed man had been partly loosed from his bandages. His eyebrows were fierce, his moustache angular and drooping. His arms had been tucked to his sides before he’d been wrapped—I thought of Grand Dan’s cottons—and this made his revived body look off balance, ready to topple. So far, only his head had been freed. Strands of bandage flung out like ribbon-ends from his neck and his still-wrapped shoulders. The man who was unwrapping him wore an orange tunic, and was pinching his nose to indicate the stench. Christ was at the centre of the scene and, to the left, a group of brown-faced saints crowded the border.

  I regretted that I had not seen this image during my childhood. It would have fed my own and Ally’s imagination—though Ally would have redrawn the scene against a backdrop of snow. The nose-pincher provided evidence that Lazarus really did stinketh, as we had believed. I memorized every detail so that I could describe it when I returned home.

  Harry found an entrance to a descending stone stairway, and I followed him into a black hole and felt my way down, step by narrow step, into a smothering, airless space. I had to duck to avoid bumping my head, and I paused at the bottom to allow my vision to adjust. I was directly behind Harry, and gave a shriek when I felt a bony hand touch my back. I lurched, realizing at the same moment that I’d been touched by the hand of a shrivelled old woman who had followed us down the steps. She pushed me out of her way even though, at full height, she barely came to my waist. She brushed past at a run—the distance was no more than four feet—and collapsed onto her knees on the tomb. Lying over the hidden bones, she began to moan and kiss the stone slab.

  Along with adjusting to the moans, my ears detected the sound of a dripping tap, and this turned out to be holy water. Seepage from the tap dripped steadily onto the earth floor and disappeared in semi-darkness. There were no lights, but we became accustomed to the space around us and watched the kerchiefed figure as she collected water in a scrunched paper cup that she had picked up off the muddy floor. I was strangely moved by the scene, though the woman continued to ignore us. She sprinkled water onto the tomb and then a few drops over herself, and vanished up the steps as quickly as she had descended, leaving the paper cup behind.

  Harry and I followed soon after, abandoning the world of the dead. Four days later, we returned home, our Big Trip at an end.

  And now, here’s a broad-winged crow, loping across the sky, listening to my story. A welcome sign of life. Is it the same crow I saw before? Have I been speaking out loud?

  The sun warms my hands. I could break into “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” this minute.

  I need someone to talk to. Don’t go. Please don’t go.

  Fly away, then. See if I care. If you come back, I’ll knock your block off.

  I do. I care.

  Caw! Haw!

  One crow for sorrow. Two for joy. The crow is an omen, I remember that. Miss Grinfeld could not have foretold the lasting influence she would have on the crevasses of my mind. Or maybe she knew all along and planned it that way.

  Cawing again. A dictator crow, warped and off-key.

  Ha! Who calls? Bid every noise be still.

  The crow saw me, I’m certain. It was black and sleek and on its own, which doesn’t bear thinking about. Uncle Fred insisted that when you see a crow by itself it means bad luck—death or accident.

  Stop dwelling on death, Georgie. If you do, you’ll fall down and die.

  I am down.

  But you’re not dead.

  Talk to the living, talk to the dead, talk to crows. It doesn’t make much difference. Maybe I’m losing my grip.

  Harry and I half-joked about drawing the pillow. If he were to die first, I was to pull the pillow from under his head. If it were me, he would draw it out. “Not with a yank,” he said. “Not with a jerk.” It was a custom he’d heard about while living at the Dixon farm. Drawing the pillow was done to hasten the end and ease the spirit’s passing.

  I have no pillow here, though I wish I did; my head and neck would feel better for it.

  I wasn’t there to draw Harry’s pillow. I wasn’t even in the room with him when he died.

  Leave it, Georgie. Pray, instead. Don’t give up. Try the Creed again. Any line that comes to your head. Maybe you’ll remember, this time.

  Suffered under Pontius Pilate

  Was crucified, dead, and buried

  Death again. What I need is a good run to keep the prayer going. I prayed at rapid speed ‘while flying over the ocean on our trip. It was a silent supplication, but my words kept the plane aloft: Keep us afloat, God. Let us stay up. Keep us afloat, God. Let us stay up. I alternated with the Lord’s Prayer like beads on a rosary, the tail of the prayer running into its head: Forever and ever, amen…Our Father, Who art in heaven…Forever and ever, amen…Our Father…

  I told Case about this after we returned home, and she shook her head in disbelief. She’s a practical flyer. She willingly turns herself over to pilot and crew, and reads on the plane until she arrives at her destination. She isn’t happy when fellow passengers pull out rosaries before landing, or cross themselves, or applaud enthusiastically at touchdown, implying that a safe landing was not expected.

  Case, our childless child. Did our loss affect her so that she was unwilling to have a child of her own? We tried to protect her but grief lay heavily, even disguised. Now she has taken on the theatre. Her art is her child. She devotes every bit of love and attention to it. And she has Rice.

  How I love my daughter, her infectious laugh, her appealing sense of humour, her beautiful black hair—touched up, now that there are a few streaks of grey.

  I’d like to send a smoke signal—to Case, or anyone—but I have no matches. Why would I have matches? If I did, I’d probably set myself on fire. Now, having thought of matches, I crave a cigarette. I have no food, no water except a slightly damp sleeve and my own saliva, and I want a cigarette. Which shows how irrational my species can be.

  There’s a flurry over there. Black garbage bag at nine o’clock.

  No, it’s the crow, still on its own. Drifted down and I didn’t notice.

  Come here, crow. Hop over on your stiff little legs. I don’t care if you’re alone; I don’t care if you’re an omen.

  If I’m quiet, maybe you’ll stay.

  I’m good to your fellow birds—though to be honest, not necessarily crows. One spring, we kept a watchful eye on a baby robin. Its mother hovered longer than usual because the baby had only one leg and teetered comically on landing. The mother guarded those abrupt little hops, that stiff-legged dance.

  The winter Verna and Arman walked into our lives, they did a stiff-legged dance of their own. Sunday morning, they came downstairs wearing their bathrobes, asked to see our record collection, put a record on the stereo, and waltzed to hymns around the living-room rug. Harry lit the fire and then he and I—and Gordo—sat and drank coffee and watched.

  They danced to “Tell me the old, old story,” which could have been written for the waltz, and “When mothers of Salem their children brought to Jesus,” which demanded a faster pace. Watching them dance to hymns we knew and loved cheered me in a way that I now find difficult to explain. I wondered, momentarily, what Grand Dan would say about my new inlaws waltzing to sacred songs on a Sunday morning, but she had been dead for fifteen years and wasn’t around to offer an opinion. In any case, she had never smacked the bare bums of Verna and Arman; they were not part of her flock.

  The logs crackled in the fireplace, the living room was overheated, we were warm and snug, our coffee mugs in our hands. On that and every subsequent visit, Verna and Arman ended the same way each Sunday, ch
eek-to-cheek in a slow waltz to “The Lord’s Prayer,” belted out by Mahalia Jackson. After the last, long, drawn-out “Amen,” they went upstairs and dressed and came back down and started the day all over again.

  Harry and I were so cheered by this, it made me wonder if, like Gordo, we were lonely, too.

  THIRTY-THREE

  One photo I found after Harry’s death was not hidden with the others in the bedside table ‘with the hinged top.

  The photo of the unknown ‘woman.

  I found it in Harry’s wooden filing cabinet in the basement, the year after he died. I did not look forward to dealing ‘with old files, and expected to find paid-up bills and old tax returns. When I finally decided to tackle the job, it was just as I had predicted. I spent an entire morning feeding paper into the shredder Case had insisted on buying, and ‘which I’d set up over a ‘wastebasket on the basement floor.

  I did not shred the photo, ‘which ‘was tucked inside a brown envelope at the back of the cabinet. The envelope was in a manila folder, by itself, which gave it importance. It was black-and-white, five by seven, taken at a town dance. I knew this immediately, because I recognized the background, the suit Harry wore, and the tie. He had asked me to pick out his tie that night and I’d chosen a paisley mixture, which I knew he liked. The dance was held in the Lion’s Club and sponsored by the Town Council to celebrate a fundraising campaign for the hospital’s new pediatric ward. After we both dressed, Harry and I had a fight, a quick flare-up. Unlike Aunt and Uncle Fred—who insisted that they couldn’t remember the reason for a fight when they obviously could—I have no memory of what Harry and I fought about, that’s how negligible it must have been. Whatever the reason, I fixed him! I removed my party clothes, put on a housecoat, and stayed home by myself. He had to go alone.