Dad looked as taken aback as I felt. He kept staring at the TV, though hockey wasn’t really his thing. He preferred world wrestling or baseball. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“Well, I’m going to be cremated. Do you want that too?” Dad said nothing. “There’s no sense in buying plots—that’s just a waste of money. Besides, with the kids so far away there’ll be no one here to take care of them.”
“I guess that would be okay, to be cremated.”
“What should we do with your ashes?”
There was another pause, as Guy Lafleur scored a goal against Toronto. A minute later, Wendel Clark got a penalty for elbowing. “You could hire a plane,” Dad said, “and drop the ashes over the roof of the house.”
My father loved planes. In the mid-1940s, as the war was coming to an end, he’d gotten a job driving the flight crews to Swift Current’s small airstrip on the edge of town. Decades later, my brother ended up in the air force, flying search-and-rescue helicopters over the Atlantic and the North. Every time a helicopter went over their house, my parents would stand in the yard and wave, in case it was my brother somehow wired like a homing pigeon and heading west.
“That’s just like you,” Mom said, “to come up with something expensive. We can’t afford a plane. Besides, I don’t want you hanging over my head on the roof for the rest of my life!”
Dad looked confused. He sipped at his beer, the organ in Maple Leaf Gardens blasting out its maddened song.
“What about the garden?” I asked.
“That’s a good idea,” he said. “You could dump me in the garden.”
“No way. I’d be tasting you every time I ate a potato.” Mom turned to me, and then, with a mischievous look, said, “Maybe we could pour him in an empty beer bottle, pop a cork in it and throw it in Duncairn Dam.”
“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Dad said. Relieved at his response, I laughed. He and Mom did too.
Duncairn Dam was a good choice. During my summer holidays before high school, Dad and I went fishing almost every Sunday afternoon at the dam in his speedboat while Mom worked at the swimming pool. The first day he’d pulled the boat into our backyard on Fourth West, Mom was furious. There was barely enough to make the rent or buy groceries, yet he’d bought a boat. We didn’t know where he’d found the money, but his pockets were bottomless when there was something he wanted.
At Duncairn, Dad would drink three or four beers, tipping the empties over the gunwales to fill them with water, then letting them sink. “Don’t tell Mom,” he’d say, and I never did. We’d go home to the chicken she had fried in case we didn’t catch any fish, our faces red from wind and sun. I’d always say I’d had a good time.
I didn’t let Mom know I felt lonely and bored in the boat with my father—I could never take a friend because I didn’t know what kind of condition he’d be in, and he and I didn’t find it easy to talk. The usual routine was to roar back and forth across the water several times, sit fishing for what seemed like days, then zoom from one end of the dam to the other until the motor was almost out of gas. At last we’d putter in to shore, where Dad loaded the boat onto the trailer and we’d start the forty-or-so-mile drive home. Sometimes I’d get to water-ski if it wasn’t too windy. Our game was that he’d try to dump me, yanking the steering wheel rapidly to the left, then the right. It was a source of pride for him when I stayed upright, banging over the hard, bumpy wake, skis rat-a-tat-tatting like a machine gun in a gangster movie. I loved the noise, the ferocious rush of the wind and my father’s head turning to look back at me while I swung from side to side like a crazed pendulum, almost lifting off into the sky.
My parents’ faces flickered in the fiery action of the game on the screen.
“Where are you going to be?” he asked, and looked at Mom. “I think I want to be with you.”
I waited for her to say something like, “That’d be a first.” Or, “You want to be with me when you’re dead? You never spend any time with me now.” But she didn’t lash out. Instead she got quiet, and the hockey game suddenly became interesting again. I let my eyes rest on the lamp on top of the TV. Although the brand of the television had changed over the years, from a wood-encased Fleetwood to an RCA to a Hitachi, the lamp had been there since Dad brought home our first set the year I was eight. It was a square piece of plastic with a light bulb behind. When it was turned on you saw a cowboy in silhouette, riding a horse, with an orange-and-yellow sunset blazing behind him and a dog trotting alongside.
After we watched the Leafs kill their latest penalty, Mom told Dad she wanted her ashes scattered on the farm where she grew up, by the freshwater stream that ran into the lake. “You remember where that is,” she said to him, “the green spot just beyond the quicksand where the cow went under.” She’d told me she thought it was as good a place as any.
“That’s it, then,” Dad said. “I’ll go there too.”
“And I don’t want a funeral,” she added. “Just the family. They can sing ‘How Great Thou Art’ by the lake, and someone can read the Twenty-third Psalm.”
“Okay by me.”
“Well, that’s that,” Mom said. “Lorna, let your brother know.”
We scattered my father’s ashes by the lake on a cold day in spring, the ground wet and slippery under our shoes. It was an alkali lake, thick with salt, encrusted with a white scab around its shores and exuding a rotting, brooding fecundity. It nestled in what could have been a pretty setting, at the bottom of hills prickly with cacti and spackled with lichened stones, but Uncle Lyn had turned the crest of the hill closest to the house into a garbage dump. It was strewn with old washers and stoves, oil barrels, the husks of cars, phantom combines waiting for a phantom crop. Down the slope, years of my uncle’s rye whiskey bottles glinted in the sun, some broken, others intact, labels peeled away by rain and snow.
It was the only lake for miles around when my mother was a child, and it was all she knew of beauty. Aspens spilled out of the coulee’s tucks and folds and cooled the summer days with noisy shade. Mallard ducks, unbothered by the stench or the taste, bobbed up and down on the wind-pleated water. Though the raw salt starched her hair and coated her face in a thin, stiff mask, she swam there every summer until she married and left home. The alkali-dense water made her buoyant.
My parents had worked out these last rites in less time than it took for a power play in a hockey game. Of course, they had grown up on farms across the road from one another. They’d known each other as children. The minerals leaching into the food and water that nourished them came from the same dry wheatland soil. They listened to the same wind, the same bird calls, the daily sibilance of the grass. Their eyes filled with the unblinking prairie light that candled the stubble at dawn.
At the lake, my mother scooped out a handful of ashes and released the last of my father to the wind. “There you go, Emerson,” she said. She dusted her hands on her dress. “You made my life better.” It was one of the most shocking things I’d ever heard. Only she knew what he had given her; only she could offer him those final words of love and praise.
my mother for
a long time
AUNTIE GLAD lived across the street in a bungalow that could have been the twin of my mother’s. The same white siding, the same slope to the roof, the same narrow verandah. At ninety-five, she was the eldest in their family, and of seven siblings, she would be the last one left. Like my mother, Glad was severely independent, living alone since her husband had died over thirty years before. Recently, though, she’d begun losing track of time. The day of the week, the year, even the seasons seemed to slide into one another like water pouring from the pump into a half-full pail.
During my aunt’s years of canning and preserving, on the labels of her jars of fruit, jams and jellies, she’d note in pen and ink a significant happening from the day. On the glass jar glowing a burgundy-red in her cupboard, the label said, “August 12, 1999, Chokecherry Jelly. Frieda Fitch broke her hip.” On a tal
ler jar of saskatoons on her cellar shelf, she’d printed, “July 21, 1980. Jock MacPherson died in bed,” and on a stubby sealer, brown inside, “September 8, 1972. Mincemeat. Russia 5, Canada 3.” She’d also kept journals over the years, starting in 1932 when she was a young woman. Most of the entries were as brief as her labels, the thin books full of the weather and simple daily tasks. “Went to the Yuricks for water today. Stopped for coffee.” Or, “Hens not laying. One egg this week. Rusty and I played crib for it.” Or, “Had a bath,” an event important enough to record every time. In the journal for 1948, on May 24 she wrote, “Peggy had a baby girl”—those five words alone on the page, no other entry for the rest of the year about the newest member of the family. I was that baby. My aunt’s unadorned notation marked the written beginning of my long relationship with her, with my mother and with words.
HOW CLEARLY the scene unwound, burned into the oldest part of my brain. Going down the wooden steps into our dirt cellar (was I four?) to get a jar of pickles. The descent came back detail by detail—my little-girl shoes, the sundress I wore out to play, my hand clutching the smooth railing. I had to be careful; there was a gap between each step where the dark poured out. The cellar was an open mouth dug into the earth. Outside, there was a small wooden door you could lift if you were as big as my brother and crawl inside and no one would ever find you.
Alkali grew through the cellar’s damp walls like a poisonous white mould. And the smells were funny there. Something sweet, something rotten, something growing. The bare light bulb burned above me, its long string hanging just within my reach. Water made noises in the cistern even when it wasn’t raining and nothing inside its tin walls should have been moving. I was sure I heard the lapping of waves, as if a blunt, fishlike creature had surfaced and was blindly swimming for the light.
To get the pickles, I had to walk across the dirt floor on the sheet of cracked linoleum, past the bin where potatoes stretched their thin arms through the slats to pull you in. The only good thing was the shelves loaded with preserves, the crabapples and saskatoons casting their own soft glow, ripe sun trapped inside glass. I was on my toes, my hand reaching for the jar, when suddenly I heard a scuffle near the bin. A lizard scuttled from the dark, then stopped in the middle of the floor and stared. I ran to the steps and screamed for Mom. Down she came, apron flapping, a butcher knife in her hand. She stepped on the lizard’s tail, stabbed it in the back, opened the furnace door and threw it in. How fierce she was, how strong! This is my first memory, I told Patrick, the first picture of my mother. All my life I’ve carried this image of her bravery, her lack of hesitation, the strange blood on her hands.
“But Lorna,” Patrick said, “it wouldn’t have been a lizard. They aren’t any in Saskatchewan. It was probably a salamander. Remember you were four and it would’ve looked big to you. Your memory’s playing tricks.”
How I argued for memory, the green body writhing on the knife, the boldness of my mother’s hands, the flames dancing on the black door of the coal furnace as she swung it open on its big hinges and slammed it shut. A lizard. At least a foot long.
“Phone your mother,” Patrick said. “Ask her how big it was.”
I dialled the number I’d been dialling all my life. “Mom,”
I said, “remember that time in the cellar? You stabbed a lizard in the back and threw it in the furnace?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You must’ve been dreaming. I never would’ve done that.”
Her response stunned me into silence.
She must have forgotten, I thought, or her battle with the dragon was so frightening she’d had to bury it deep in her mind where she couldn’t call it back. Nothing I said on the phone convinced her.
“You were always such an imaginative child,” she said.
That scene in the cellar, as much as anything in my childhood, shaped how I saw my mother—her courage, her invincibility. Years later I came across a passage from the Talmud. If I’d known it then, it might have made me feel better when she insisted I’d been dreaming. I could have replied, “I am yours and my dreams are yours. I have dreamed a dream and I do not know what it means.”
THE MAY of her eighty-eighth birthday, my mother was not strong enough to clean her windows. By July she couldn’t pick her peas or dig potatoes, though only two months earlier she’d planted a garden huge enough for two big combines to park side by side. I thought a good death for her would be to fall between the rows; when she didn’t answer the phone that day, a friend would find her among the tall peas. She was not strong enough to walk the half block to the park as she had done the week before, leaning into me, not strong enough to make her meals or to pull the wide blue blinds down in the morning in the verandah to keep out the sun. One day she told me she couldn’t dress herself. She perched on the edge of the bed, and I asked her to raise her bum so I could pull on her underwear, then the summer shorts she’d chosen for the heat. She didn’t need to tell me she was strong enough to die. I could see it in her face, in the brown hand that clawed my forearm when she pulled herself slowly to her feet. She was not just getting off the bed but starting her difficult climb, rung by rung, up the invisible ladder to the sun.
ONE REASON she was ready to go, my mother said, was that she could finally leave her sister Glad behind. What a relief! Glad had been a burden since she’d moved in across the street, Mom having to do her bills, mail her letters, buy her groceries and sometimes cook her meals. That April, even though my mother’s illness had sapped her of energy, she’d done Glad’s spring cleaning after she’d finished her own. And Glad was never appreciative. All their lives she’d found fault with my mother, and she’d carried her nastiness from childhood into their adult relationship. I kept telling Mom that she was too old to take care of her sister, but Glad was in her nineties, she said, and her mind was going. Over the last few years she’d had a number of mini-strokes. My mother had to remind her to go to the doctor, to see her hairdresser for her weekly shampoo, to put her meat in the fridge and throw away the moulding leftovers. People kept stealing from her, Glad told my mother: money from her wallet, an old rubber garden hose, her hearing aid and glasses, one day a sheet of oatmeal cookies she hadn’t baked. Mom said her sister had always surmised things. Childless, Glad explained to the hairdresser that her mother had sewed her up when she turned eleven, stitched her shut with a long red thread. The gypsies showed her mother how to do it. “Grandma was a good sewer,” Mom said to me, “but she didn’t do that.” Glad’s husband was sterile because he’d had the mumps. The town doctor had warned her of the problem before the wedding and advised her to back out before it was too late.
When they were kids, Glad kept her siblings under control with a horsewhip and tattled to their strict father when he came in from the fields for supper. Because of her snitching, usually one of them, though the meal was sparse, had to go without the rice pudding Grandma made for dessert every day of the week. Not even any raisins in it, just white rice and milk with cinnamon sprinkled on the top. Grandma baked it in the oven in the big enamel pan they used later to wash the dishes and, once a week, to wash their hair.
“WHEN I SEE your dad again,” Mom said, “we’re going to go skating.” So far, that was the most astonishing thing she’d said about her readiness to go. After all they’d been through, after all the difficulties his drinking and selfishness had caused, that was what she saw them doing when they met sixteen years after his death. I caught a sob in my throat when she told me that. When she saw Dad again, they were going skating.
MY MOTHER never spoke badly of her parents. Her silence was a pact she’d signed in blood, like many of her generation. No use complaining; there were worse off than you. She’d told me about being sent at five to the farm down the road, to live with the Winstons. For the next ten years, she was their slave child.
One of her tasks was to pull weeds from the field where the Winstons had planted their crop. When we drove near Success one August, my mot
her pointed at the yellow flowers in the ditch. “See,” she said, “they’re sunflowers and they grow in the gumbo.”
“I think they’re brown-eyed Susans, Mom.”
“I don’t care what you call them. I hate them, they’re what I had to pull out day after day in the heat.” I’d never heard that detail of her story before.
There’s a photo of my mother around age six with her siblings and her parents. It must have been taken one of the times she was allowed back home. Behind them, the dust settles just for the time it takes the camera to catch the scene and its gawky, bird-boned children. Her hair’s “straight as a board,” her dress shapeless. She has no shoes, same as her brothers and sisters, and she doesn’t smile. She never smiles in any photograph taken of her and her family.
“I must learn a new way of weeping,” the Peruvian poet César Vallejo wrote. For now, I thought, the old way would have to do.
ONE OF THE sweetest memories from my childhood is the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the porch door as I came into our yard from school. Mom learned to bake her bread at the Winstons. Too short to punch it down, she stood on a stool at the kitchen table, her fists pummelling. If the bread didn’t turn out, she didn’t get any supper, and after the others had eaten and she’d done the dishes, she had to start again, mixing the sugar, water and yeast, adding the liquid to the big bowl of flour, staying awake until the bread had risen, punching it down, letting it rise a second time, punching it down again, then putting it in the oven, and finally, the house in darkness, sliding its pans onto a wooden board to cool. She kept herself from sleeping by standing up, trying to balance on one leg, then the other. Even then, she dozed off like a horse on its feet, and the bread would have burned if something hadn’t made her jerk awake. Mrs. Winston’s yelling down the stairs, the tolling of the hours from the tall clock in the hallway, the image of her mother waking her up in the early morning to pick berries before the sun got too hot.
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