After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  Cynthia, though, had been just six, and small, and quiet, and she had taken Cynthia away.

  Clara’s former colleague had told her, when she had telephoned him: “He’ll never get out. Where he’ll be is more secure than a jail cell, and not half as comfortable. And there’s no parole.” He had not said what Clara had: that if Buck were not insane going into the institution, he’d likely become so.

  In the hours after the funeral and inquest — packing up personal things, papers, her mother’s good dishes, putting everything into storage — Sidonie finds the application forms, filled out in Buck’s choked printing, for the removal of Beauvoir from agricultural reserve zoning. The signature lines are empty. The presence of the form is baffling. The only reason anyone took land out of the reserve was to be able to subdivide. There would have been no chance of Alice agreeing to this, surely. Sidonie stubbornly believed that Alice had wanted to orchard again, despite her angry arguments against Buck’s pipe dreams: her roots were buried too deep. And the property is still half Sidonie’s, as she and Alice had not yet got around to having a new deed drawn up. So even if Alice had signed, the application would have been useless.

  But had Buck known that the property was still half in Sidonie’s name? How much had he known about Alice’s plans?

  “Was your father unhappy about your mom asking for a divorce?” she asked the boys. Stephen had been silent: a telling silence. Kevin had laughed, hard and without humour.

  Buck said in his statement to the police that he and Alice had been arguing, that they’d both been drinking, that he’d given her a slap upside the head, that he might have had something, a tool or something in his hand, he’d just come in from working in the sheds, he couldn’t remember.

  Perhaps she should not have left the boys. They had been fine, except for Paul — they had done better than you might expect, but she should not have left them. A sin of omission. Buck, she does not regret; he had a trail of rottenness through him, a trail of willful destruction. Buck was like a dog the Rilkes had adopted, who had been, as a pup, struck over the head and thrown in a dry well. The dog was never right: it had fits; it bit children; it chewed up the nice cushion Mrs. Rilke had given it to sleep on; it flew at cars, and had been struck and injured at least three times. Mr. Rilke had cried, she remembers Father saying, when he put it down. But he had done the only sensible thing, and shot it, finally.

  A human being is not a dog: she knows that. But who had been left to mourn Buck, who had his incarceration or his death injured?

  Well, his mother, for one. By the time of Sidonie’s mother’s death, when Alice and Buck had moved into Beauvoir, Buck’s father, that old piece of shit, as Alice had called him, had been put out of commission by a couple of strokes: he had sat, blank-gazed in a wheelchair. Buck’s mother had looked ten years younger, had been helpful and deferential to Alice. Had, Alice said, often babysat Cynthia, had doted on Cynthia. After Alice’s murder, Buck’s brother Gerry, his sister Lottie, had paid a call to Sidonie, to thank her for saving Buck from jail, to assure her that the children would be well cared for by the family. She had not given anything away. She had come to their house the next day, while Gerry and Lottie were not at home, with Dr. Stewart, with the lawyer, and had asked Mrs. Kleinholz to pack Cynthia’s bag.

  Mrs. Kleinholz had wept, but had not fought; she remembers that.

  Buck had not died in the psychiatric hospital down near the river at Coquitlam; times had changed. In the late eighties he had been released, she had read in the reports; he had become a changed man, had found religion, had become a sort of lay pastor, even. Buck had not died then; he had died, a few years later, of pneumonia.

  She is not sorry about taking Cynthia. A nasty place, that house, with its dreariness, its absence of toys or books or decoration, with that dirty old man still living there. She is perhaps sorry for Mrs. Kleinholz. She had been at Stephen’s wedding twelve years later: looking cared for, quiet, in a dark dress. And Lottie, suddenly glamorous, her pale hair cut and styled fashionably, her dressmaker’s suit. Lottie had become an airline hostess, Mrs. Kleinholz had said. She wonders if Mrs. Kleinholz is still living, if Cynthia is in touch with her, or with Lottie. Gerry had ended up doing time in jail, and John, if she remembers, had gone into the armed forces.

  She does not think that any of the children are in touch with their Kleinholz uncles.

  A bad, violent streak in that family. Though maybe Mr. Kleinholz’s drinking and temper had been at the root of it. And the Kleinholzes had been displaced persons, she remembers: Germans who had been evacuated from Poland after the war, after the creation of the Soviet bloc. Who knows what they had suffered before turning up in Marshall’s Landing?

  She remembers Masao speaking to her, before the funeral. “It’s a terrible thing, Sidonie. But don’t hate. Let it go.”

  She had turned away; has not spoken to him since.

  She thinks, now, that she would trade a good deal to see Masao again.

  A long winter. She keeps to herself; she walks around the little half-frozen lake. She contracts bronchitis, though she has not been out in public enough, she thinks, to pick up any germs. She reads.

  She has dislodged something that ought not to have been dug up. Something rank, stained, is surfacing. There is more of it. She does not want to look.

  The new doctor she sees about her bronchitis insists on a complete physical, but proclaims her healthy. Her lungs are clear and capacious, her blood pressure low, her pulse strong, her colon polypfree, her ovaries and uterus appropriately somnolent. Even her teeth are her own, though the molars are a keyboard of amalgam, the incisors becoming startlingly horse-like, she notices, as she brushes.

  She is lucky; her friends are not as healthy as she. Anita, for example, has had hip replacements, and has lost some height. Anita is gnome-like, with her large round eyes, her bent posture, her long grey thistledown hair. Clara, too, walks with a stick; although she swings it vigorously and makes jokes, she needs it for even small hills. And Clara carries a little extra weight — perhaps thirty pounds, Sidonie judges, which makes her puff a little on inclines, and contributes to some prodigious snoring. When Clara and Anita and Sidonie had gone to Florida together, a couple of winters ago, Anita and Sidonie hadn’t been able to sleep, and they’d had to get a second room, for Clara.

  Hugh, too, has health issues, as Cynthia would call them. He takes an array of pills for his heart and circulatory system. His knees make cartilaginous popping sounds when he walks. He forgets small current things, though not the details of the past. He has an enlarged prostate, he says — whatever that means. She won’t let him tell her anything more.

  The doctor concludes that she was in remarkably good shape. “Your family are all as long-lived and healthy as you are?”

  She starts to say yes, but catches herself. “My parents both died in their seventies,” she says.

  “And your siblings?”

  “I had one sister,” she says. “She died young.”

  “And are you married?”

  “My husband died several years ago,” she says. “We were divorced for many years before that.” Curious, the order she has chosen.

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  “Are you retired? I see that you have recently moved here from Quebec.”

  “Yes. But still writing articles, going to conferences.” She sees the drift of his questions; she’ll head him off thoroughly.

  “Ah, then you are a professional! Tell me, what is your line of work?”

  Only a slight lilt, a slight over-precision in his English. She wonders how he came to be practicing here, in this small interior city.

  “Plenty of family and friends here?”

  “Plenty,” she says firmly.

  But he is persistent, this young man.

  “Sometimes I find that when my patients retire, they have a little trouble with adjusting. They miss the routine of work, the camaraderie. No signs of depression?
”

  “No,” she says. “No. Not at all.”

  “Good,” he says. And then, “I always recommend to them to try something new, join a club or organization. I say to them, ‘Try yoga.’ Do you do yoga?”

  “No,” Sidonie says.

  “Or volunteer work,” he says. “There is always the need for volunteers. Ah, the life of the mind. That is a great dispensation.”

  What an odd word for him to have chosen. But perhaps he meant something else. Disposition? Compensation?

  She doesn’t ask.

  A healthy mind in a healthy body; that’s what people had said when she was young. What did they mean by it? She has known unhealthy minds in healthy bodies, and vice versa. It had been drilled into them, as children, though: reading improving books, eating fresh fruit and vegetables, bathing. Not thinking sexual thoughts. Or not too many sexual thoughts, if you had the good luck to be United Church, rather than Catholic or Lutheran.

  Had it done them any good? Too difficult to tell; so many of them have not survived, even, to early old age.

  The unfortunate aspect of living to be a hundred, of course, is that everyone you know will be dead.

  I walk, she tells the doctor firmly, to close off his questioning.

  The little lake near her house is grey-white in winter, a depressing no-colour, the ice mottled, clotted, like porridge. And the low-lying lake fog has filled the valley like a soiled bolster for nearly three weeks on end, and the sun, such as it is, sets behind the hill to the south and west by two o’clock in the afternoon. What has become of the clear bright January days she remembers from childhood?

  She had skated on this little lake as a child. She learned to skate here, on sheets of ice scraped clear by fathers with makeshift ploughs of rectangles of plywood attached to two-by-four handles. Some years the ice was smooth as glass; others, if the lake had frozen up during a storm, it was pocked or rippled. Then skating was difficult, treacherous. But sometimes the lake froze perfectly, and there was only a little dry snow, which the wind blew away; then they could all skate right across the lake to the stands of poplar trees on the far side. That was like flying, or the closest you could come to flying, to glide without obstacle across the little lake, under a pearl sky, to the dark curtain of pines.

  The pines are dying now; the mergansers and teal and grebes gone for the winter.

  She marches sturdily along the icy, rocky path. She ought not to be walking it by herself, perhaps, even with her rubber-and-wire boot grips. But she has come to know its dips and turns over the winter; she can anticipate where she will need to bank to the left, to dig her heels in, to put a hand out to the black-and-ochre bark of a dying pine.

  The trees had been thicker, the snow deeper, fifty years ago, she thinks. She has heard that the winters really are warmer now; that warmer winters are the cause of the pine beetle epidemic, in fact. She feels that this winter has been warmer than those of her childhood. There have not been the deep snowfalls, the punishing cold. Only this continuous fog and the freeze, thaw, freeze that glazes the roads and walkways. When she was a girl here, not only this lake, but even the bigger, deeper ones had frozen so thoroughly that people had driven their trucks out on them. She remembers driving in her father’s truck right across this lake, right to this side from the other. The ice thick as a rock wall. But you would not drive on it now.

  Winter here had been more vigorous in her childhood: the roads snowed in, the fruit trees dormant, sometimes cracking and losing limbs under heavy snowfall, sometimes losing blossoms to late frost. The beaches abandoned, the tourists flown south. And now, winter in the valley seems so much milder, more like what is called winter at the coast.

  And yet, the climate has apparently changed only a degree or so. It is curious that such a small alteration should make so much difference. And also that warming should bring such destruction with it. It is this warming that has killed the pine. All along the valley, where the cool blue-green of the ponderosa, the dominant species, swathed the dry hills, there are now only streaks and patches of rust-colour. The hillsides seem to be in decay.

  A beetle the size of a grain of rice has wreaked this. The slight increase of warmth has allowed a tiny fraction more of larvae to survive the winter, and these additional larvae, like compounding interest, have swelled the numbers of beetles to unimaginable hosts. So curious (and of course alarming) that these minute changes have had such dramatic, perhaps catastrophic results.

  She strides along on the thin, slippery snow. Red-osier dogwood, saskatoon berry, Silverberry, Soopolallie. The edge-shrubs, the encroachers, always looking for an opening in the thin dry forest. How does any plant survive here at all, with the scarcity of moisture? These, perhaps, send their roots down to the level of the little lake and draw up water. She had forgotten their names, had not thought of them all of these years, and here they are on her tongue. They are bare-branched now, silver and taupe and wine-barked. Possibly they are as beautiful now as they ever are, for they are not lush or promising shrubs. They have small, sparse leaves, unprepossessing flowers, dry, bitter berries. But now, just as it sets, the sun ekes through the low-lying cloud, and the shrubs are suddenly touched with subtle colour, silvery-sage-green and plum-red, stark and lovely, in their narrow branches, as etchings.

  She stops for a moment. Around the base of a dogwood, where the glossy red stems branch out, the snow has thawed into multiple overlapping circles, and among the circles are the cross-hatchings of bird tracks. She waits; one more moment, two, and then the chickadees come back as silently as they must have left at her approach, landing in the bright ruddy branches, then hopping down to forage in the leaf litter.

  It is serious business, foraging for food in the wild in January. Claw and bill, they sort and seize, only a slight toss of their throats showing that they have found sustenance under the withered leaves. How diligent they are, how resourceful, their sleek grey bodies and black-and-white hoods moving quickly, purposefully, economically.

  And then she moves her hand in its white fleece glove, and they scatter upward and into the brush like blown leaves.

  Two hours to circumambulate the lake; that breaks the back of the afternoon.

  She returns to her house after her walk along the lake path, a little less heavy. Succored. Is that the word? She says it aloud, hears the pun. Suckered. Suckered into carrying on for another day, another evening. Though it’s not as if there’s much choice.

  FISH GIRL

  When Sidonie was born, she got stuck. Her head was very large, and she was a large baby altogether. Dr. Stewart estimated at least ten pounds, though they didn’t think to get the scale from the shed. The district health nurse, visiting a week later, said her scale weighed Sidonie at ten pounds and four ounces. Mother was in labour for seventy-two hours, she says. Though Sidonie knows how babies are born — Alice and Hugh have enlightened her, and anyway, she has watched the cat have kittens — when she imagines her own birth, she sees Mother pulling her out of a hole in the ground.

  The hole would have to be somewhere on the outer edge of the garden near the rhubarb and asparagus patches, where the orchard grass started. It would have to be smaller than the well, but larger than a marmot’s tunnel. Mother would have pulled for three days. That was labour: Mother bent over double, grunting, sweat flying from her forehead, darkening her dress beneath her armpits and breasts. Mother pulling Sidonie by the hair, which sticks straight up like beet or carrot tops. It is not painful, but a pleasant sort of pressure. And then, finally, Sidonie bursting from the earth, head first of course, and Mother flying backwards, head over heels. Heels over head. Arse over teakettle, as Mr. Inglis would say. But ending up sitting right-side-up, turnip-headed Sidonie lying in her lap, naked except for a fine dark fur over her private parts. And blue as a saskatoon berry.

  Mother says that Sidonie was blue when she was born. Blue and limp. “I was quite sure she was dead,” Mother says. “After three days of that. But Dr. Stewart put her across
her arm and massaged the life back into her. And then she stitched me up, because her shoulder came up at the last minute and ripped me from stem to stern. I couldn’t sit without a cushion under me for six weeks.”

  Stem to stern: what does that mean? But Sidonie can’t ask, because she hears this narrative from behind the wine flannel curtain. She is not supposed to have heard it.

  Sometimes Mother will say about Dr. Stewart, “Without her, neither of us would be alive today.” And sometimes she will say, “Doctors — hang you up on a meat hook and carve you up, just as soon as look at you.”

  This is women talk: conversation that takes place in hushed voices when there are no men or children around. Sidonie extracts from what she overhears that childbirth and pregnancy are battles played out on women’s bodies: fierce, violent, unnatural calamities. The cat has her kittens silently, slipping them out, little wet packages, into the hay, bending her head around to nip and lick off the caul — which she then neatly eats — and, with her Turkish-towel tongue, licks the kittens into blind mewing life.

  Once Sidonie hears someone ask Mother if Sidonie had been quite all right after being without air for so long. Mother says, coldly, “Without air?”

  “You said she was blue.”

  “Oh, yes — well. She only needed to start breathing. A good slap on the backside would have done it, I daresay.”

  “I knew a woman in Calgary,” this woman says, “whose baby wasn’t breathing when he was born. And the doctor got him breathing finally, but he was quite handicapped, poor child, though he looked normal. I wondered if it would have been kinder not to interfere.”

  Mother says, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with Sidonie. She’s just always been awkward.”

  She remembers herself at eleven or twelve. She and Father are doing the dishes. Father says “Time and motion!” and “One-two-three-hoopla!” and whistles Bach, which is very good washing-up music. Sidonie cleans the table knives as her father taught her: put them in the sink all facing the same direction, grab them by the handles, fan out the blades, pass the wash rag back and front, swish, drop onto the drain board. The rhythm of the whistling moves her hands, gives her brain a chance to think, but not think itself into the usual tangle.