by Wendy Orr
Maybe that’s when her interest in reforestation had begun. In all their hundred and four acres, there wasn’t one tree to hide behind, not a single private place to cry. She remembers keeping away from the house in case Dulcie popped in—‘But who’d get Ian’s dinner if you were at school?’ her mother-in-law had asked. (Jane had wanted to scream, wondering if she was expected to tear her hair, rend her clothes in contrition: ‘Why didn’t I realise the man would starve if I left him alone for the day?’) Striding across paddocks to burn off her anger, she was painfully aware that both neighbours and husband could see any aberrant behaviour such as throwing herself on the ground to weep. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d had a dog to walk with her but dogs were another source of contention—‘Working dogs can’t be pets,’ said Ian, still in shock from their stay at Mary’s, where the dogs not only slept on the couch but licked out the roast pan after dinner.
Then one lunchtime, as she stood at the sink filling the kettle for tea, he announced that if she really thought working would make her happy, she should do it. She’d been too grateful to question this sudden understanding, and it could have been coincidence, she tells herself now, that he and Fred had visited the accountant that morning and the full scale of the debt they’d taken on had been made apparent.
It must have been at much the same time, because she either hadn’t started working or was still just doing infrequent emergency teaching, that she had gone in to Yarralong, armed with the fat total of wedding cheques, to buy a set of china. Something classic—they’d already bought orange and yellow stoneware for every day, but fine china lasted a lifetime and she wanted to love it still when she set the table for their golden wedding anniversary. The thought made her glow and she dressed carefully, a brown maxi skirt she’d bought in London and a soft, slightly clingy shirt from Sears that always made her feel good—the last time she’d worn it they’d had to go back to bed before she got out the door.
It was the first time she’d planned a major shopping day in Yarralong: the dinner service, two blue bath towels, some pump belts Ian hadn’t been able to get locally, and then a bulk grocery in the supermarket, so much cheaper than Narling. Narling, though fractionally larger than Applevale, was very similar: small stores and personal contact, shopkeepers fascinated by her accent, where was she from and how long was she staying; the perennial question of what was the difference between Canadians and Americans, wasn’t it all one country now and was it true they ate doughnuts for breakfast? It was friendly but sometimes wearing and much of the attraction of Yarralong was that it seemed large enough for a difference in vowels to be unlikely to mark her as particularly foreign.
She was smiling as she walked into the jeweller’s on the corner, past the diamond solitaires and strings of pearls to their array of china, Royal Albert plates, Wedgwood and Noritake. She pictured placing them in front of Ian, for dinner parties, for Christmases.
‘Can I help you?’ the saleswoman asked.
And Jane answered. ‘I’m looking for a set of good china,’ she must have said, or something like it, because what else was there to say, but she saw the woman’s face freeze as the words came out, freeze and harden with something like contempt, though surely there was nothing contemptible in spending this gift, the thoughtful, unbreakable sum of Jane’s assorted aunts and uncles.
‘We don’t have anything in this shop,’ the woman said, and now the contempt was no less confusing but it was not a mistake, it was real and as blunt and heavy as a baseball bat, ‘that would suit you.’
‘Unbelievable,’ Sue would say years later, when Jane had recovered enough to see that the shame was not hers and could tell it as an amusingly pointed anecdote. ‘I know people hated Americans during the war, but 1970, and in Yarralong . . . I can’t believe someone could treat you like that!’ Sue would hug her then, in anger and apology, because someone had, and no matter how often Jane rewound and replayed—was there a tear in her skirt, was a shirt button undone?—the woman continued to advance with a smile until she heard Jane’s words.
‘Thank you,’ Jane replied, or maybe even ‘Sorry,’ because habit was stronger than thought and she was obviously in the wrong. Then she must have turned and walked out into the street and past the department store where the bath towels would also remain unbought, although those moments were as blocked from her mind as the instants surrounding an accident, which was how she felt, physically winded, her breath taken from her by scorn. How can I live here, she thought, if I can’t even get served in a store? Then, So this is prejudice. This is what life’s like for Winston, except I’m invisible until I talk. And knew that this was simultaneously gross overreaction and truth.
She felt shrivelled, diminished in body and soul, and wished she were home with Ian without the interruption of a forty-minute drive. Ian would be angry on her behalf, his outrage would comfort her—there was nothing wrong with her, Ian would say, this was not how things should be.
The day had taken longer than she’d realised; as she pulled in the gate Ian was already on his motorbike, driving the cows home for milking. Jane hurriedly stowed perishables, changed into jeans and rushed to the dairy to clean the milk vat, dumping in the first bucket of boiling water as Ian returned.
‘Did you get the belts?’
She produced the bag. ‘But I couldn’t buy the china!’
Ian was already squatting at the pump, threading on the new belt as she told him the story. ‘She wouldn’t have expected you to buy something so expensive on your own,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone without me.’
When you have only one guide to a foreign land, you don’t question whether these are the rules of the country or the rules of the guide; you forget that in any culture, norms vary from individual to individual, family to family. You only know that to be different is to be wrong, and that conformity will bring peace. And then you store away your mistakes, your obvious alienage, in the part of your soul labelled shame.
Or maybe you’re more likely to react that way if you’ve always doubted your ability to live up to expectations; if you’ve always felt that life is a race run on an ever-accelerating treadmill of unachievable standards. If when you were five what you wanted to be when you grew up was tall like Mommy, and when you grew up you found that small was how you were going to stay.
At any rate, that’s how Jane felt.
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that she’d gone to Europe to finish growing up but had married Ian instead, and somehow along the way she’d exchanged living up to her mother for living up to her husband. She remembers thinking that thirty, her generation’s definition of age and untrustworthiness, must be grown up, but when thirty arrived she was the mother of a demanding toddler and cast down by the repeated failures of miscarriage, and the self-confidence of adulthood had passed her by. Maybe it was one of those pivotal developmental stages, like encouraging a two year old’s innate sense of tidiness before you condemn them to a life of disorder—if you don’t become an adult at thirty, you’ve missed the boat, doomed to a permanent, insecure adolescence.
Now here she is in a London antique shop, coveting a fragile, frivolous set of china, and realising that the wedding present money had never been spent.
The joy of Bill’s homecoming, the delirium of reunion with his wife and introduction to their new daughter, is tempered by the fresh realisation of the absence of his brother and grandfather. Although it is not the same sharp grief he feels for Bert, he wishes Grandpère could have waited to meet Ruth and Jane, and so on the soft June morning that is the first anniversary of the old man’s death, the three of them visit the grave.
‘You know,’ Bill says, his hand on Jane’s bonneted head, shielding it from the cold wind of hatred, ‘once he left the French shore, Grandpère never saw any of the rest of his family again—not even his children. Dad says no one even came to the funeral. You wonder what went wrong.’
With a satisfying sense of theatre, Ruth watches a short,
stocky woman, bright eyed and brisk stepped, carry a generous bunch of lilac across the cemetery towards them. ‘We might be about to find out.’
Tante Isabelle is the youngest of Grandpère’s six children; never married, she’s been brought here today by a nephew with business to do in Applevale. She begins in French but switches easily to English at the look of incomprehension on Bill’s face. Ruth does not fare much better—school-girl Swiss French bears little resemblance to rapid colloquial Acadian.
‘So you are William?’ she demands. ‘Or Albert?’
‘Bert’s dead,’ Bill says gruffly.
Her face softens. ‘Too many nephews dead; Raymond and Robert, and now you say Albert as well, and we didn’t even know it. That’s long enough for this nonsense, don’t you think?’
Bill nods, but Ruth adds, ‘We were just wondering what . . . the nonsense was.’
‘That takes some time to tell!’ says Isabelle with the gleeful expression of a storyteller with a captive audience. ‘And this is perhaps not the place for it, you standing with that little one.’
Jane blows a raspberry, waiting for the usual expression of delight, but Isabelle’s aching for a baby is too long outgrown for her to find this clever. ‘She is how old?’
‘Nearly five months.’
‘She will not be tall like her father, I think. I never thought I’d see a Dubois so big as this one! But there is something of Georges around the eyes. And Georges?’ she adds quickly. ‘He is well? It’s an eternity since I’ve seen him, since the war, and now there’s been another war and still I haven’t seen him. Such stupidity!’
They find a bench in the warming sun. Tante Isabelle, to hear the story as she tells it, has always been the peacemaker, wanting Maman to forgive her son for marrying outside the faith, but who would listen to her? And then when Maman died and Papa wanted to make the peace, the others were so strong against it, saying Maman had died of a broken heart and it was all Georges’ fault, so that there was no peace at all and Papa went off to live with Georges. She, Isabelle, had tried again to make peace, but they couldn’t be reasonable. Then the letter about Papa’s death had gone to the wrong address and arrived the week after the funeral, and they said that Georges had done it on purpose, but she had said to them, is he a magician, to know Louis had built a new house?
She has not drawn breath by the time nephew Bernard, oldest son of Louis of the new house, the bad back, and six other features that Ruth and Bill have already forgotten, arrives. Bernard is stoic and silent—perhaps in self-defence, thinks Ruth, if this is a sample of the women in the family—but he shakes hands warmly and is content to wait. If there is bad blood between the families, it doesn’t seem to have bled on to the cousins.
‘Do you have children, Bernard?’ Ruth asks, already plotting, already greedy for Jane and a net of kinship to anchor her so that she will never ever wonder who she is and how she came to be born where she was.
Bernard grins shyly. ‘Three of them, and my wife waits for another in July.’
‘Jane,’ says Ruth, ‘you have cousins!’
‘Twenty-seven cousins to Bill,’ says Isabelle, counting briefly. ‘And the children of cousins—I don’t know how you say that in English—that I will need to think, because it changes.’
‘A plethora of cousins’, Ruth murmurs in Jane’s ear, adding in Myrtle’s ten nieces and nephews. The baby gurgles, which might have been more at the tickle of her mother’s breath than delight at relatives.
Isabelle continues to count but Ruth doesn’t mind about the exact numbers, or the terminology of seconds and once removed; she will never become interested in the genealogy of faded certificates—it’s the stories she wants, stories that create the larger world of family and history and the smaller one of identity. Which is exactly what Tante Marie-Josette collects. Isabelle is family peacemaker, busybody and occasionally what her great-niece Jane will learn to call stirrer, but Marie-Josette, similarly spinster but a generation older, has inherited tales of fortune and mis-, luck and courage. The English daughter-in-law of an estranged nephew is not the link to posterity that she had anticipated, but when the rapprochement is complete she accepts it eagerly.
So, every few months from now until the old lady dies in 1961, Ruth drives down to the French shore, a long hour if Bill drives and considerably less if she does herself. She takes Jane, and then Mike and then Rick, and then they are all in school and she goes alone; she will stop on the way home for scallops in Digby or blueberries at a roadside stall, and often for a walk at Port Royal, peopling the empty fort with the stories she’s heard.
In between she reads history and studies French, the same assiduity that she threw into learning to fly at university now concentrated on gleaning all that she can of her children’s heritage. (Bill, aware of his wife’s sharp mind and the limited stimulus that a farm and rural community provide for it, watches without comment and some relief. When she’s learning, she’s happy, will be his motto throughout the next forty-nine years.)
Brought up to be amused by regional dialects in Britain, determined to keep her own accent and avoid idiosyncratic Valley phrasings in English, she is equally determined to lose her expensively acquired French accent and learn every nuance of St Mary’s Bay Acadian. And although her proper English inflection never quite loses itself in the rapid French, she becomes fluent enough to follow the stories—because stories, Marie-Josette says, must be told in French, English being a language for facts and business, not the subtleties of hearts and history.
Marie-Josette tells the stories as if they are from her own time, as if she herself has seen the smoke of her sacked home in the Deportation of 1755 or knows the two Guillaumes, a generation apart, who were navigators—‘On boats, you understand . . .’
Accounts of old sailing voyages are added to Ruth’s list of reading and become one thing in which Bill will join her, intrigue in the details of direction overcoming the lack of interest in cold water.
But the family started with Bernard, Marie-Josette explains, just a boy in 1604 when he sailed with his carpenter father on Champlain’s expedition to build Port Royal . . .
Ruth begins with a search for these snippets of past lives, family tales for her children to cherish, but her abiding passion is the pattern that a story makes as it wends its way through time and space. Tragic or fortuitous coincidence; the ragged edges of war and the hard lines of peace jostle and shape the soft flesh of human destiny. Cause and effect stretch back through history; entanglements ripple across oceans.
Impossible, she thinks, applying the Oxford-trained brain that she believes is commonsense, to speculate on why Bernard returned with his own family to this uncharted wilderness without first studying the French wars of religion. She speculates on whether the Edict of Nantes and subsequent horrors were the reasons for steadfast Acadian pacifism through a century of conflict, but decides that the recently finished war, so soon after the one to end all wars, disproves any theory of peace born of blood.
However, unlike the classics she’s been brought up to study, family tales do not have neat endings; legends can quickly unravel when small holes are picked at with the veracity of history texts.
Bernard’s son Louis, who is said to have been born in Port Royal, married a Mi’kmaq woman and became a fur trader. ‘But tragically,’ the old lady sighs, ‘Louis was cut off from his father during the war of the fur trade.’
Ruth, wondering whether the name Dubois comes from this life in the woods, goes back to read the history: dates of colonisation, the land grant for the first Acadian-born French child, the internecine fur wars.
Louis could not have been born in the New World.
However, for nearly three hundred years, this story has been part of his family, shaping the family as the family shapes the story. After the terror of the Deportation, would the sixty-five year old Bernard-le-Jeune have returned to Grand Pré from his twenty years in Cherbourg if he hadn’t been descended from one of the very first
Acadians?
Ruth is never sure whether Marie-Josette has come to the conclusion that the story is more important than the truth, or whether, having little interest in reading more official histories, she has simply never added up the dates.
Jane has always been struck more by the divergence in what is known about different ancestors. She knows that her own story, sandwiched between her charismatic mother and daughter, will be one of the invisibles.
Perhaps this feeling was behind the project she began in her second year at Narling Primary and briefly imagined as a paper: ‘Children’s Own Stories: A Novel Approach to the Social Sciences’. They would look at not only their own brief lives but the context they’d been inserted into: family, history and society. Jane pictured it as a social snapshot, especially in schools with a less homogenous racial mix than her class’s one Italian child, one half-Dutch, one Koori and twenty-two Anglo–Celts. For many of the latter, her own accent was the most foreign they knew.
The Koori girl’s mother came to see her at lunch. Her people were worried, she said, although she did not word it so bluntly or directly, that Jane wanted to appropriate their stories. The children’s family stories belonged to them and their kin, not to a teacher to put in a book. ‘We’ve had enough stolen,’ she did not say, but Jane—discussing, explaining, finally convincing that it was empowerment not confiscation she was aiming at—heard it and felt the weight of a history she hadn’t known she shared.
Ruth has always told herself that her study of family history is purely for her children’s benefit, and her sense of betrayal when they all leave the province is deep.
I’ve used you as a journal for nearly thirty years, she writes to Mary after Rick’s departure, so perhaps you won’t question my sanity now. The last thing one would wish for one’s children is a life of un- or underemployment in an increasingly impoverished province. (I’m sure you’ll have noted the irony in the only one interested in farming having followed her husband to the opposite end of the world to do so.) They’ve each done the best, or the only thing they could do—so why do I feel so angry?