by Wendy Orr
Except that fifty-six, even fifty-seven or fifty-eight, is too young to retire. He’ll have to do something, and they have discussed it round the table and the bed, but nothing is right. He loves that farm, can’t imagine living anywhere else, and the thought of anyone else working it hurts him like a physical pain; but to finish milking and simply live there to raise beef or other people’s heifers would be to waste that huge shed, the twenty-four stall gates, the milk vat that cost the price of a small house, the automatic cup-removers, in-line cleaners, pumps and motors and all the other things that go into a two hundred cow dairy. And the cold hard fact is that the money they’ve sunk into it means they simply can’t afford to retire without getting it back.
‘I’ll work for EcoFarm with you,’ he says occasionally, and how can she be selfish enough to say no, that’s mine; I need that part of my life where I’m Jane, not just your wife. People respect me there for who I am, what I know and what I’ve done, and if you come in, with your strong arms planting two trees to my one, and above all your masculinity, they’ll look to you, and even what I’ve done will be changed in time to Ian. It’s not your fault; it’s the way it is. But it doesn’t make it any easier to picture the future.
In fact, at the moment, swamped by the artifacts of generations and her own childhood, it’s difficult to picture anything at all. And if this sorting out of the past seems unbearable, sorting out the bureaucracy of the present seems impossible. It can’t be true that she’ll have to go to Ottawa. There must be an easier, closer way of sorting it out. It should be simple. As if bureaucracy is known for simplicity. Or logic or humanity. What if she has to go through the whole immigration procedure again? It took months the first time. She was young then, at the beginning of her earning life, teachers were in short supply and migrants, especially English speaking, were being actively pursued. Policies have changed, times have changed, she’s changed—she is no longer an attractive proposition.
You own half a business, says the logical part of her mind. You have a husband and daughter. On family reunion grounds only, you’d have to be admitted.
But remember? says the panicker, and now she does remember the story too close for comfort, told by the South African physio at the Bayswater hotel about the woman from Australia. You didn’t pay attention because the country was no more than a name to you then. Her mother had broken her hip, was dying in a North London hospital, and the daughter had dashed back—sound familiar?—to see her. And when she got there the mother didn’t die, but the daughter couldn’t go back because she hadn’t got a re-entry visa before she left, and how could you forget that, that warning story? Was there something at the back of your mind that made you want to get stuck here one day?
The physio had left before the end of the story, so Jane never knew whether that woman, who’d lived in Australia for twenty years, thirty years, had a husband, two sons and a farm—or maybe she’s made the farm up, the coincidence is too great—ever got home again.
Of course she did, says the voice of reason. She’s not still wandering around North London trying to find her way to Australia.
Because she’s probably dead now anyway, died trying. She was as old as Ruth, a war bride too, quite likely; the strain would have been too great. Husband and kids gave up on her; forgot her, their wife/mother on the other side of the world.
Now the voice of reason, the mother voice, says that she is getting hysterical and points out she hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s airline supper. There will be bread in the freezer, crackers in the cupboard, but Jane wants something comforting and doesn’t know what that might be. She roams the pantry like a teenager home from school and finds a jar of dried dulse.
What she’s asking for is Proustian magic: childhood relived through salty pungency. What she gets is tough bitter seaweed.
She tries another piece and spits it out. One more, tentatively, and then there’s no doubt—it’s not the dulse that’s off, it’s her. There are no crackers in the pantry after all, so she has another coffee to wipe out the taste, crying softly at the symbolism: if she can’t eat dulse any more or vegemite yet, then where does she belong?
She feels jittery; her skin is too tight for her body. She wonders how much coffee she’s drunk. She takes the phone off the hook again, goes back to bed and tries desperately to relax. Megan would lecture her about coffee depleting chi, but Jane would have put up with the lecture if Megan had been there to insinuate silver needles into relevant points; ‘Window to the sky,’ she might explain, treating her mother in a strange, caring reversal of roles, and Jane would feel herself drifting through clouds, dreamy and peaceful. Megan sees the colours of the meridians on the body she is working with—the liver meridian yellow, gall bladder green; not all corresponding to their official colours on Chinese medicine charts but useful to her—and the points that she will choose to needle once she has taken the pulses and examined the tongue are often darker or even red, like an angry spot on the line of colour. She is dreamy herself as she inserts the needles, concentrating on what no one else can see, and Jane doesn’t view her then as Megan her daughter but as some priestess of the body communing with its soul.
How will I bear it, she thinks, if Megan falls in love and stays in Canada, and I’m back in Australia?
As promised, Megan does see a lot on this Trans-Canada drive. Barns of the lush Fraser Valley, so different from the concrete dairies and irrigated paddocks of her childhood; over Rogers Pass with a stop at Hell’s Gate, a few more photo stops and a wander on a Rockies trail for picnic lunch. She has a brief turn at driving, enjoying the racy gear changes of steep curving roads, but has trouble remembering that a left-hand turn involves crossing a lane of traffic. At the first sinister scenic stop, despite the excellent brakes of the bus hurtling down the mountain towards them, a white-faced Adam says he’ll take over.
‘You navigate,’ he suggests, as if the Trans-Canada is a maze of alternative routes, because they don’t know each other well enough to risk hurting feelings.
Despite her heritage, Megan has no sense of direction and little interest in maps. She is an utterly unreliable navigator. On the few occasions decisions need to be made, Adam follows highway signs and politely ignores her directions. ‘It’s being in the wrong hemisphere,’ she explains next morning, surprised at where the sun rises in Kamloops; but in fact her internal compass is no better in Melbourne. She accepts being lost as one of life’s experiences, but would have liked to be sufficiently in harmony with nature to instinctively face the sunrise.
Now, map on knee, she is pleased to match the litany of names with the green highway signs: Coquitlam and Chilliwack; Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw; Qu’Appelle and Portage La Prairie; and the ones that are the same as home: Sorrento and Rutherglen, Port Arthur of grisly fame. They blend with snapshot impressions and sensory imprints—a smell of pines, soughing of wind through prairie cottonwoods, gophers popping up by quiet holes.
Lake Louise is more beautiful than she’d expected, Banff more touristy; she’d have been grateful for her West Coast hike even without what came with it. The prairies are not as flat as home or as featureless as advertised, but even so, between Calgary and Lake Superior it begins to blur: endless sunsets and wheatfields; red silos and small country towns. Picnicking near the turn-off to Rivers, loving in a motel in Winnipeg, she is unaware of any connection with the places where her grandfather studied sextant and astrotables to plot that first, heart-in-mouth blind flight. And yet her very existence has been created from those twists of fate; another course, another week, a mark lower or higher, and Ruth, landing on that airfield three years later, would have been met by some other airman. It doesn’t take much to change a life, or make it.
For once, however, Megan is not interested in the links of fate. And when, much later, she looks through photograph albums, she will be surprised at how clear her memory is of the places they have visited, because at the time, whether they are in the car or out of it, her world consists of
a small enclosed bubble in which nothing is real but Adam and her own emotions.
Blurring again through the expanses of rural Quebec and New Brunswick, not so much the fault of the forests as nearness to journey’s end. But it is not till Moncton, the last night and by unspoken agreement an almost luxurious motel, that Adam wakes and says, continuing Megan’s ‘What are we going to do?’ of a week earlier, ‘Where are we going to live?’
This is not a question that Megan’s grandfather or father could, or did, ask. This is a question of their generation, but momentous enough at any time.
‘Compromise halfway,’ she says, twirling the hairs on his chest into tiny ringlets, ‘Tahiti.’
He pictures her in grass skirt and lei. ‘I’d never get to work.’ But adds, so as not to seem sexist or domineering, ‘And your patients would forget why they came,’ which also sounds more sexist, or at least more about sex, than he’d intended.
‘We could spend a year in each place and then decide.’ Megan is glowing; more than happiness, she feels the chi of her body coursing through its meridians like a palpable force. If she’d been alone she would have bounced on the bed or turned cartwheels, though if she’d been alone there wouldn’t have been the reason for it. The decision itself does not seem particularly daunting to her—if the universe has seen fit to bring them together, there will be a solution for the minor technicalities of continents.
‘We’ll have to find out about qualifications and things,’ says Adam, more practised in bureaucracy than synchronicity and fate. He knows that whichever direction they travel, there will be interviews, medicals, police checks, work permits, visas, possible problems with degrees and careers. The mud and ladders of their first week will be easy in comparison.
‘Have I ever shown you this?’ Megan asks, though of course she hasn’t, neither Canadian motels nor falling in love requiring proof of identity. ‘Mum thought dual nationality might come in handy one day. It’s my Canadian citizenship card. I must have been about seven.’
Since Adam does not look for omens, he doesn’t see this small, laminated photo-ID as anything more than a solution to one possible, although extremely significant problem. Instead, as he studies the picture of a dark-haired, bright-eyed child, he’s simply overwhelmed by his conviction. This, he thinks, is what our daughter will look like.
The number of objects in a house is finite; it’s a law of physics, or ought to be. But if the house has been a family home for nearly two hundred years and includes a shed for storage, the sum total of the accumulation is so close to infinity that it doesn’t much matter. And if the person trying to sort the accumulation into piles keeps stopping to read fifty-two years worth of letters, the task becomes exponentially greater. For by now, as well as Ruth’s letters to Mary, Jane has found the drawer containing her own letters to her parents, the story of her life from age twenty-three to the present in weekly instalments.
By midnight Thursday she has cleared Ruth’s bedroom and bathroom; she leaves Bill’s coats for Mike and Rick to check. She has gone through her own bedroom, which takes longer even though there seems no point in packing till she knows when she’s going. She’s done a preliminary hunt through the bookcases and has found the signed copy of Winston’s first novel, Black Shadows in Acadia, with his picture on the back. He’s a better looking man than boy, but she’s not sure if the emotion she feels is manufactured or real. She puts the book onto her private stack.
The bags for the Salvation Army have been dragged down to the shed, but she’s kept away from windows and garden because she’s still not ready to face the neighbours. But she’s read most of her mother’s letters and samples of her own, and maybe that’s why she’s forgotten to phone the Australian High Commission, and forgotten to try Ian in the hours when he could be in and awake. And perhaps it’s the letters, and perhaps it’s having three hours of sleep in forty-eight, or being in this home where Ian’s never been and so can’t be imagined, or forgetting that the phone is still off the hook and deciding that Ian’s silence makes his death increasingly likely, but she’s cried more than in all the years since her last miscarriage. A dead baby is a logical thing to cry for and so is a dead mother, but she’s not sure that she’s crying for Ruth.
This wouldn’t be so hard, she thinks, if I’d visited more often! Which may or may not be true, but definitely leaves her feeling unfairly treated so that she’s angry enough to make lists of demands to be resolved if she goes home—and she realises if has become a possibility—a dog, the EcoFarm job, her own spending money. Later still, as she’s dumping plastic containers into yet another bag for the Salvos, it strikes her that it’s twenty-eight years since she’s tried to negotiate any of these things, and maybe Ian would have bent a little more with time if she hadn’t surrendered unconditionally back then. Not a comfortable thought, and she bursts into tears again and wonders if this is what a nervous breakdown is like.
‘Or maybe this is a nervous breakdown,’ she thinks, and decides that if so she’d better get some sleep so she can get over it before her brothers arrive.
The night is cool and Jane, half waking to snuggle against Ian’s warmth, is momentarily bereft at finding him not there. I miss him, she thinks and the revelation stirs her; she wants to make love. What do people do for sex when they don’t have husbands? By people she means middle-aged women, and specifically fifty-two year old, long-married women who aren’t sure which continent they belong in. She doesn’t find the answers appealing, and thinks instead about being in bed with Ian, and the way his hands can still obliterate everything except the sense of touch, as if her body is nothing but a collection of nerve ends to be stroked and sated. So many years since their games on the bus; control games, she thinks now, but no less erotic for that. She wonders if he’d play those games now, or if she would, and falls asleep wondering.
And wakes, early as the sun, still with a sense of altered reality and possibilities, so that when the horse appears through the morning mist in the old apple orchard behind the house, she lets herself believe that it belongs to Ruth. There are so many things her mother hadn’t mentioned, a horse is minor in comparison. There is still a bridle in the shed, and a saddle, which is just as well because a last flicker of realism tells her that she is past the age for bareback riding, no matter how romantic and in keeping with her mood it might be. Perhaps most importantly, there’s the sugar cube from her old riding coat and although this horse is probably too modern to have been given sugar, he recognises the outstretched palm with gift and the coaxing tsk, and after a quick canter around the field to demonstrate his independence sidles up to accept both bribe and bridle. Lochinvar’s saddle fits him well though he’s taller than Lockie had been. Fifteen two, Jane decides, stepping easily into her old way of measuring horses against her own height and absurdly smug that she remembers.
Gingerly around the apple orchard and he’s a lovely boy, a dream horse, but the orchard is not a place for riding, with low branches and rough ground, and the horse’s own paddock, as Jane calls it now, is his place for relaxing not work. She dismounts for the gate and then heads to the road, that long gravel road winding the rest of the way up to the top of the mountain before starting down towards Spa Springs, safely anonymous past the farms on this side, past the curve in the dark woods where Brennan used to shy and once bolted three miles before she could turn him for home, but this lovely boy trots on without a flicker. Where the road runs straight and sandy for a good kilometre along the crest of the mountain, they canter and it’s as if she’s always ridden him, has had years to accustom herself to his movement lively and smooth beneath her, his warm bulk between her legs. Her body doesn’t know that it’s been thirty years since she rode; it has no idea of age or gravity or tomorrow’s stiffness and Jane follows its lead and feels nothing but this pure and simple joy of being astride the best horse she’s ever ridden, on a soft fall morning past the forest and fields that are her soul’s standard of beauty, in the land where she belongs.
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That’s it, she thinks, that’s my answer. This is where I come from, this is where I should stay.
There’s a group of new houses ahead where Lightfoots’ farm used to be, houses too close to the road and she is no longer confident of remaining anonymous, or at least of the horse remaining so, so she turns, her golden boy responding to the gentlest touch of the reins, and they canter back to where the Dubois woods start, her woods. The path is still there where she used to ride Brennan, clearer even than the last time she used it as if the forest has opened its heart to her; face-slapping branches trimmed and the ground cleared of horse-tripping sticks. The blueberry clearing too is more open than she remembers, a secret meadow, large enough to canter in circles and figure eights, and then there is the log in the middle, a wind-toppled fir, a metre diameter—not high as jumps go, but as substantial as inevitable. She is leaning over the horse’s neck, rising in her seat, knees gripping so firmly she could lose her stirrups and not falter, riding better than she’s ever ridden, more alive than she’s ever been. The lovely boy gathers his haunches and springs, an effortless float like a metaphor of freedom, and then fluidly to ground, Jane still with him and settling back into the saddle. She rubs his neck, ‘Good boy, good horse,’ and he’s hot and sweating with that wonderful pungent horse smell, and they turn for home.