“Do you know how to find Dad?” she said in the perpetual dusk of the room. I didn’t know what she was asking. Did I know where he was in the afterworld she believed in? Had God built for her a mansion with many rooms? Was her husband waiting for her in one of them, or was her heaven a countryside, a series of farms and villages, different roads to navigate, the dead dogs barking?
She was worried we wouldn’t find the spring that fed into the alkali lake on her parents’ farm where we’d scattered Dad’s ashes. The previous July she and I had driven out there and couldn’t locate it, maybe because Uncle Lyn, who now owned the land, hadn’t cut the grass for bales, and the old cow path was grown over.
“I think it was the mosquitoes, Mom. We didn’t walk far enough because of the mosquitoes. But we’ll find it, because the grass will be greener near the spring, won’t it? And there’s that big stone.” Against her pillow, her face was jaundiced. I’d packed away the yellow blouses and T-shirts from her closet. They didn’t look good on her anymore.
“Do you want things to happen as you told me, Mom? Just the family and the lake? All those friends who’ve been phoning, they’re going to want a way to say goodbye.”
“Don’t you dare give me a funeral,” she said, the toughness in her voice a warning signal familiar from my childhood. “I don’t want a funeral. Just toss my ashes on the water. I’ve always loved the lake.”
“Soon you’ll be there forever, Mom.”
“Swimming with the ducks,” she said. “And I’ll have a new bathing suit. Or maybe I’ll go skinny-dipping now that I’m so skinny.”
“And that water,” I said, “that awful alkali water will never let you drown.”
I’d learned it was possible to cry and laugh at the same time, to cry and talk at the same time, to cry and cry though you thought the well of tears was empty. An unseen endless spring kept flowing in and out of me. My mother, however, had yet to cry. It was if she had dried up inside. Was that one of the things that let me know how close she was to dying? The Mycenaean Greeks called the dead “the thirsty” and their place “the dry country.” It would be tragic if after all the years of living in parched Saskatchewan my mother were to spend eternity in a sere country of wind and dust.
For her sake, I hoped eternity was no more than a person’s happiest experience, best imaginings, deepest longings: a lake that tastes bitter on the tongue; a long frozen river a man and woman glide down, arm in arm, among the stars; a clear sky higher than all other skies where no storms gather.
ONE OF THE WORST things Mom did as a kid was to accept her older brother Mac’s dare to walk around the rim of the horse trough. She fell in, her siblings laughing, but when Grandpa came with his team from the fields, the horses wouldn’t drink. Water was scarce, and to fill the trough took several trips to the pump with a pail. “Boy, was Grandpa mad,” she said. She didn’t remember what he did to her, but she remembered it was Glad who told.
THERE WOULD be no family for me when Mom was gone except my brother and my beloved, Patrick, nine years my senior. My breath stopped when I thought of Patrick going first.
Barry had left home when I was eleven, and since then, we’d rarely been in touch. I’d thought his love was like hard candies in his pocket; once they’d been slipped to those closest to him—his wife and children—there was nothing left. The weeks after Mom fell ill were different. He was a devoted brother and son. When we weren’t in Swift Current together, we were on the phone every day, wondering if we were doing the right thing and what should happen next. I had a new appreciation of him, new insight into the sensitivity he hid behind gruffness and firm action, habits from his years as a hockey player and then a captain in the air force and a helicopter rescue pilot. When we greeted each other we hugged and kissed, and on the phone he sometimes called me “dear.” Would he be lost to me again, I wondered, after Mom was gone?
We agreed we’d take care of her in her house for as long as we could. We wouldn’t dump her in one of those terrible nursing homes where the old and demented shout and drool. That was no place for our mother.
WHEN DAD LAY DYING, he told Mom he’d dreamed he’d gone to heaven. “Did you meet anyone you know?” she asked. “No,” he said. He’d only made it halfway there. SINCE I’D MOVED to the coast fifteen years earlier, every Mother’s Day, which fell around Mom’s birthday, I’d fly to visit. We’d drive my rental car to the nursery by the creek and buy her rose bushes for her front bed. You’d think we’d have filled it up in that time, but the bed took up half the yard, and many roses didn’t make it through the winter. Usually I’d buy her three each spring, choosing by colour. She had several pinks, a mauve like the underside of a dove’s breast, a pale peach, a yellow the shade of a mango’s skin, four reds, a cream like the tasty pout that rose to the top of the old milk bottles in winter. A sure sign of her illness was that she’d let her rose garden go that year. It bristled with sow thistles and a sticky, nettle-like vine that strangled the stems and buds.
Mom told me not to bother, but I spent hours weeding and deadheading. A lassitude had fallen over the garden, many of the branches bending to the ground as if they’d lost the will to stand upright. It wasn’t blossoms that were weighing them down. I couldn’t figure it out. One red rose had gone wild, shooting out a thin, pulsing brightness on leggy branches. Its scent rode the heat waves and washed over me. Mom insisted I cut it down; then the tea rose that had been grafted might come back. On other bushes the buds were tight and dry. They seemed stopped in time and wouldn’t open. Was something eating them from the inside, too? I lacked my mother’s wisdom and her touch. I couldn’t save them, yet I couldn’t give up. I hacked and weeded and tore, my hands grabbing where I shouldn’t have grabbed and holding on.
“WHEN I SEE your dad again,” Mom said, “we’re going to go dancing.”
“Dancing? A few weeks ago, you said you were going to go skating.”
“I know,” she said, “but who can tell what season it will be up there? Maybe it won’t be cold enough for ice.”
MOM DECIDED in her implacable way that she wanted to go into a nursing home. A space would be available two days thence. Over the phone, Patrick tried to help me understand. “She wants care with compassion, not care with love,” he told me. There was no stopping her. I was afraid she was doing it because she’d become a “bother,” something she swore she’d never be.
“You kids have your normal lives to lead,” she said.
Nothing’s normal, Mom, I thought, not anymore.
She had me confirm the booking and phone the ambulance. She’d be going to the town of Leader, an hour and a half away on the worst road in the province.
“I’ve never ridden in an ambulance before,” she said, joy in her voice. She was like a kid going to the circus, like a country cousin anticipating the train that would take her to the city. Why was I sad when she was ecstatic? What was it I wasn’t getting? Would I ever arrive before she’d left where she’d already been? No trace of her but a pair of abandoned shoes.
I’D ALWAYS liked the idea of a body’s energy returning to the great mass of energy that makes up the world, its spirit and its matter. If I became the force that drove the worm through the rosebud, if I greened a blade of prairie grass—I could live and die with that. Now, though, I wanted my mother to remain intact. I wanted her to be up there looking down at me. I didn’t want to lose her to the grass, the trees, the beetles, the crickets. I wouldn’t be satisfied with her hair blowing from the mouths of the crocuses in the spring, her stubbornness and persistence driving the wind that pushed me along the road. What had sounded earth-affirming no longer comforted me. “Mom,” I said, “you’d better drop a pebble on my head now and then when I’m being stupid, just to show me you’re there.”
She grinned a sweet grin that didn’t reach her eyes any more. They’d become flat, like the circle of water inside a well no wind or light could reach. “You better watch out! One day it will be a big stone.”
&n
bsp; WHEN MOM went to the nursing home, she’d be leaving her house forever. They’d told her to bring her favourite chair, her television and anything else that would make her feel at home. Linda and I packed her summer clothes and a quilt. In her bedroom hung the old family photos of her wedding and of my brother and me. I asked her which pictures she wanted us to tuck into her suitcase. “I don’t want any of them,” she said. “I’m done with all that.”
When the ambulance arrived, she met the two attendants on the verandah and walked with them down the four front steps to the stretcher. Not once, in her journey away from what she had known and loved for almost thirty years, did she look back.
THE DAY before Mom was to leave, I asked her about Glad. “Do you want to phone and tell her you’re going?”
“No. You go over and let her know. I don’t want to talk to her.”
I walked into Glad’s house without knocking, because I knew she wouldn’t hear. I sat beside her on the couch and turned off the TV. The couch was piled with newspapers, a Kleenex box, ends of wool balls, cards from her birthday a month earlier, and a half-eaten ham sandwich on brown bread. “Auntie Glad,” I said, “Mom is leaving her house tomorrow and going into a home. She won’t be back.”
“I didn’t know she was sick,” Glad said.
“I know you’re confused, but I’ve been telling you for weeks about the cancer and that she’s not getting better.”
“You never know,” Glad said, “you never know what’s going to happen, do you? I suppose I’ll go soon too.”
She was even shorter than Mom, the widow’s hump in her back hunching her shoulders. Sitting beside her, I could see the top of her head where her hair was thinning. Her scalp shone a pale pink. We were both having trouble talking. Her voice was a thousand years old.
I held her hand. “I was so happy,” she said, “when I found out I had a little sister. I’d had two brothers, you know, and then I had a little sister. I took care of her. Should I go over and say goodbye? I don’t know if I can do it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s sleeping, and we’re leaving early tomorrow, there won’t be time. I don’t want anything to upset her.”
I took my hand from hers and placed hers in her lap. “Do you understand,” I asked, “do you understand what I’ve just told you? She doesn’t have much time left. And she’s leaving her house for good tomorrow. She’s going to a home.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s so sad, isn’t it, it’s so sad.”
I turned the TV on again and asked if the volume was okay. Our conversation had taken only a few minutes: the commercials were still on. I walked from her house and across the street to Mom’s. I was walking across an entire continent, across years of bitterness and anger and love. No maps, no easy passage. I wanted to lie in the middle of the road and never move again.
WHILE WE WAITED for the ambulance, I’d told Mom what Glad had said about wanting a sister. My mother’s eyes brightened with tears, the first I’d seen, but they didn’t spill over. “This was the best way for us to say goodbye,” she said. “I don’t want to see her.”
IT WASN’T ONLY the roses that defeated us that summer. In the back garden stretched rows and rows of peas and potatoes and beans. Barry and Linda spent two days digging and picking and shelling, until Barry’s back gave out. Linda said she’d never been so dirty in her life. They left the rest for me and Patrick. Our troubles amused Mom in the nursing home. She couldn’t believe we were so useless, so weak.
And what would we do with pails and pails of vegetables? None of us, including the grandchildren, had a basement cold room like she did. We didn’t eat that many potatoes anymore. Their fate concerned her more than the roses. There was too much Welsh and Irish in our family history, too much poverty, to leave them. The flowers could die, even from neglect, but you didn’t let potatoes rot in the ground or peas harden on the vines. If there had been a magical way to call the grackles down, I’d have done it. Mom always flew small flags along the rows of peas to scare them off. I wanted the opposite, a flirtatious flutter. And where were the bad kids who raided gardens like we used to do, just for the danger of it? How had this old woman picked and shelled and dug and dug and dug until this final summer of her life?
A FEW DAYS after we’d settled Mom in the nursing home, Linda took a deserved break. I drove alone to Leader. Barry was in Cochrane and would join us soon. Though only a chair and a small television were missing, the house felt hollowed out and sadly animate, as if it knew the tough, beloved spirit that was my mother would not grace its rooms again. In the bathroom, the door locked, Linda lowered herself into the full, deep tub. She heard the back door open, and then footsteps up the stairs and through the kitchen. “Peggy,” an old woman’s voice called again and again. “Peggy, where are you?” Glad wandered through the house, calling and calling. Linda sat still and silent in the cooling water. “Peggy, are you home?”
not waving but
drowning
WHEN I SAW my mother again, it wasn’t where I’d expected. Not in the rose bed in the front yard of her small house. Maybe she knew better than to go there; a year after her death, weeds towered above the bushes I could barely see. The new owners weren’t tending them. The whole house looked shabby, as it had never looked before.
My brother had rototilled the vegetable garden before he locked up the house the previous September. Now it was the second week of July, but as I drove down the alley past the backyard, I saw only thistles pushing meanly from the soil. I knew instantly Mom wasn’t there, and I felt strangely calm about the house’s slide into neglect. It really didn’t matter. The house was shaping itself not around my mother but around the people who lived there now. Instead of the garden, the young couple, newly married, had different things on their minds.
I hoped to see my mother at the new house on the coast Patrick and I moved into four months after she died. We’d used the small amount of money that was my inheritance to upgrade to a place on a quieter street with more light. I wanted to show her the garden, fashioned out of moss and water and stones, and the guest room, furnished with her dresser with its round mirror and her bed with the tulip quilt Auntie Glad had made and sold to her for more than it was worth. “You’d think she could have given it to me,” Mom said, “after all I’ve done for her.”
There was a park across the road from our new house, with a trail leading to the ocean. I wanted to walk with her through the trees to the shore. We could wade in together, me in rubber shoes, her barefoot; surely the stones could no longer hurt her feet. In the nursing home, a couple of weeks before the end, she’d told me one morning that her feet had died in the night. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Are they numb? Did you feel pins and needles?”
No, she said. She had just woken up and known her feet had gone on ahead. They were already dancing. She was so happy. “Soon I’ll join them,” she said.
EVERY JULY for the past twenty-five years, I’ve spent two weeks at a monastery an hour out of Saskatoon. It turns into a college come fall, but it’s also a year-round working farm. It’s a place for me to write and to visit the chicken sheds and barns, to talk to the horses behind the fence and to touch the velvet of their mouths if they’ll let me.
The year I turned fifty, I was diagnosed with melanoma. On the side of my right foot a freckle had grown to twice its size. The surgeon cut it out and stitched on a piece of skin grafted from my upper thigh. Before I learned that I had to avoid the sun, I used to walk past the tall school building at the abbey to the running track and sit on the highest level of the bleachers where there wasn’t a lick of shade.
Surrounded by a curve of spruce, the track hasn’t been used in years. For some reason it comforts me to see it so solidly there, the grass it circles overgrown with short white clover, the blossoms exactly the size and shape of the plastic beads we wore as kids. The beads popped together and pulled apart so you could make a necklace or bracelet of whatever length you wanted. That’s where I
saw my mother, at the track, sitting on the top bench, her sturdy legs brown below her shorts, the pair she had pinned at the waist so she could wear them those last weeks in the home. She had a top to match.
I had driven her to the Wal-Mart on the edge of Swift Current to buy the material, a thin, cheap cotton blazing with red flowers. Her hems were always lumpy, but you didn’t notice the imperfections once she pulled on her homemade outfits. She looked so good in them, though nothing she sewed for me fit right. She didn’t have the patience to finish things properly.
People respect the need for solitude at the monastery. Normally, I wouldn’t have spoken to someone on the bleachers. But there was something about the way the person sat, the shortness of her legs and her rounded shoulders, that made me go nearer.
“Finally,” my mother said, then grinned. “I didn’t know you were such a dawdler.”
I climbed to the top and sat beside her, as if our meeting had been pre-arranged. “You didn’t expect to see me here, did you?” she said. I dug my elbows into my ribs to keep from crying. That’s all she’d seen me do the last two months of her life. Every word I’d spoken was soggy then, and barely understandable.
“You always surprise me,” I said to my mother. I put my hand on her bare arm. Her skin was warm, as if she’d spent all day in her garden, her smell familiar, a mix of dust and sun and the good sweat of outdoor labour. I was afraid to say anything else in case she’d disappear.
A crow from one of the spruce trees started cawing. “At home we would’ve shot him,” she said. “For stealing robins’ eggs. I wish your dad had taught me how to use a gun.”
“I didn’t know you’d be thinking of killing things, Mom. I mean, in the place you went to.”
Small Beneath the Sky Page 14