“You have no idea,” she said. “And I’m not here to tell you. I’m here for you to see the runner.” She pointed to the far end of the track.
I peered at the track and past it, into the row of spruce lined up like monks in evergreen cowls, but I couldn’t see a runner. Just the crow on top of one of the trees, the branch dipping with his weight, and smaller birds I couldn’t make out diving around him. From where we sat we could hear the highway, the whoosh of cars and trucks going somewhere fast. The air carried the sound so clearly you could hear the tires strike a patch where the pavement had heaved in the winter or worn thin.
“I can’t see anything, Mom.”
“You never could see what was right in front of your nose,” she said, patting me on the knee. “You were always looking for something else.”
“Do you see a runner?”
“You writers are supposed to be so smart!” There was mischief in her voice, as if she wanted to get a rise out of me. “You know one thing that happens? The dead get their real teeth back.” She opened her mouth. “See, these aren’t false any more, they’re real. Oh, there he goes, another lap.”
“Mom,” I said, “I don’t get it.” Dragonflies bucked in the air like small winged ponies trying to toss the sun off their backs. They hunted in posses, and I felt good sitting in their midst as they devoured mosquitoes.
Mom looked at me the way she used to when I’d done something that pleased her, when I was the apple of her eye. “I’m really here to tell you to wear a hat.”
“You’ve come just to tell me that?”
“Yes,” she said, the wind in the spruce trees picking up. I thought that might be a signal for her to vanish; she never liked the wind. I wanted to say, Mom, don’t go, but I didn’t. I knew how ready she’d been to leave the world.
“Okay,” she said, “one more thing. I’m glad you took the dresser. The first time you saw your face, almost sixty years ago, was in that mirror. I held you up and introduced you to yourself. Baby, I said, this is you. Think of that and maybe you won’t feel so sad.” She pointed again at the track. “There he goes,” she said.
My god, I could see him! A teenage boy in a red baseball cap running in the sunny half, his thighs and arms pumping. He wasn’t a ghost. He had the grace of the living and the young. In fact, I’d seen him yesterday in the Muenster post office picking up a parcel from the woman behind the counter. He told her he was going to school that fall to finish the high school classes he’d missed. He wanted to go into criminal justice and maybe become a Mountie.
The boy stopped in front of us, bent over, catching his breath. The sun burned behind him. “I don’t seem to get any faster,” he said. When he straightened, I could see he wasn’t the teenager who wanted to be a Mountie after all, but the middle-aged man who helped with the haying on the abbey. He lived in a trailer near the big barn. Just as I was wondering if he could see my mother, I sensed an emptiness beside me.
She was gone, and in the time it took to look at where she’d been, the runner was halfway down the track. Why had she wanted me to see him? Was it to remind me life goes fast? It’s as short as a run around a track, a boy turning into a man the age of his father, just like that? My mother had never talked in symbols. About my poems, she used to ask, why don’t you just say what you mean? Surely I was missing something.
I let the wind blow over me and through my hair. That was one of the reasons I didn’t wear a hat; the wind blew my stale thoughts away. The surface of the track was pocked like the dips in an old bathing cap. Rain had hammered the earth two nights before, the sheet lightning so bright and frequent it was as if the sky were taking pictures with a flash.
The birds that had been dive-bombing the crow were gone. The crow was gone. When I tipped my head, the sky held the reflection of my face, though I couldn’t see it, like in the bevelled circular mirror of my mother’s dresser. Baby, she had said almost sixty years ago, this is you.
I SAW HER again two weeks later. It was my last day at the abbey, and I was walking the grid in the early morning. I stared at the wheat field to the east, trying to measure how much of it had turned to gold. It had been green when I arrived. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, but in the middle of the field someone seemed to be waving. It could only be my mother, I thought. No one else would be in the middle of a wheat field in the middle of nowhere.
She and I were no strangers to walking. How often the two of us would trudge home from somewhere downtown through blinding snow. Maybe that’s why she thought it wouldn’t bother me to plow halfway down a wheat field. I was anxious that the farmer would catch me and bawl me out. Anyone, even people born in cities, knew you didn’t do that. You didn’t tread through perfectly good wheat, flattening a row the combine couldn’t pick up. My mother had been a farm kid. I wondered why she’d chosen this spot to turn up again. If it had been her father’s field, she’d have been punished.
“Wonderful here, isn’t it?” she said. “You almost disappear.”
She was right. If she hadn’t raised her arms and waved she would have been invisible. A few inches taller, I could barely see above the ripe seed heads. She might have been light enough for me to hoist on my shoulders, but I didn’t try. She stood on a small flattened circle in the field, but there was no wheat trodden down, no path leading to her. You would have sworn a dozen gophers had stampeded to where I stood. I felt hot and sticky, the sun branding the back of my neck. “Where’s your hat?” she asked. I showed her the hood on my T-shirt. “I pull it up when the sun’s out,” I said. I demonstrated how it covered my head.
“If you’re going to do something halfway, don’t do it at all,” she said, familiar words from my childhood. Then, “Don’t worry, I won’t nag. You’ll only get stubborn and not listen.”
“Mom, are you going to disappear like last time, with no warning?” Mosquitoes were starting to find me, buzzing and diving for my skin. I slapped my arm, then my shoulder, the tops of my hands. Though her arms and legs were bare—she wore the same outfit as before but in a different material, this one a pale blue denim—the mosquitoes didn’t bother her. I didn’t want to think about that.
“There was something I’d forgotten to ask,” she said.
“How is he?”
“Barry’s fine,” I said. “I saw him a month ago.”
“No, not your brother. I know how he is. I mean Dr. Phil.”
Dr. Phil? I didn’t remember Mom being so intimate with any of the doctors at the Swift Current hospital or the care home in Leader. It had always been Dr. and then some long last name we found difficult to pronounce: once it was Pakistani, once Nigerian, once Sri Lankan. To the first doctor, the internist whose skin was the colour of mahogany, she’d said, “Your shirt is so white. Your wife must take good care of you.” It had made me cringe.
“Dr. Phil, you silly, on TV. You know who I mean.”
Dr. Phil was one of the daily programs I’d watched with her when I was home on a visit. The other was Regis and Kelly from New York. She didn’t miss either show except on the days they conflicted with her aqua exercises. I never watched them on my own. It was one of the things we did together to pass the time. “Why do you want to know about Dr. Phil?” I asked.
“There’s something you need to hear from him,” she said.
I couldn’t imagine what that would be. I found Dr. Phil a self-righteous bully. And I had his message down pat after watching only a few programs with her: you have a choice in this life, you don’t have to accept someone else’s bad behaviour and you must own up to your own. Didn’t I know that already? After all these years was I still blaming my regrets and flaws on my parents?
“Mom, you’ve come all the way from wherever you are to tell me to watch Dr. Phil? There’s so much I want you to tell me.” She started to blur, the edges of her watery, like heat waves rising from asphalt on the highway. “Okay, okay, don’t go! I’m sorry. I’ll watch Dr. Phil.”
“Anyway, I’m not s
upposed to tell you much. I promised,” she said.
Promised? Promised who? I didn’t ask. On all sides the wheat was so lush and thick you couldn’t see past it; it was a jungle of stalk after golden stalk you’d need machetes to break through. I could see the sky only when I tipped my head, but my hearing seemed sharper, finely tuned like a cat’s. Whispers rippled through the field. It was just the wind, I said to myself, the wind catching up on gossip with the ripening grasses.
“Mom, what’s it like there? Do you see Dad? Is it like being back on the farm?”
“There ain’t no raisins in my rice pudding,” she said, looking right at me. Her eyes were the clear, almost indigo blue I’d found so beautiful before they’d clouded over in the last weeks of her life.
“That sounds like the start of a blues song, Mom.”
“Well, you sing it, sweetie pie. I don’t have a voice.”
“What do you mean? You’re talking to me now.” A tractor started up in the distance. It was the sound a ruffed grouse makes when he’s mating, but this was the wrong season for that. I tried another tack. “Where you are—are you dancing?”
“How could you not dance with the angels?” she said, grinning. “On the end of a hatpin. A pearl one, the smoothest, whitest floor you could ever glide across. Like a sheet of ice. Imagine that!”
“Mom,” I said, “get serious.” She’d never talked like this before. “Are you happy? What’s it like? Is Dad there with you?”
“What’s the name of this wheat?” she asked. “I used to know that when I was young. Now it’s all just wheat, wheat, wheat. Let me tell you, when you’re dead, what you’ve forgotten doesn’t come back. Keep remembering,” she said. “You don’t get another chance.” She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired. “I cry a lot now, can you believe that? All the tears the dead don’t shed on earth, they do after. I don’t know why. I should’ve cried when I saw you meet the Queen. What was it she said to you again when she shook your hand?”
A year before her death I’d recited a poem at the gala performance for the Queen during Saskatchewan’s centennial. It was at the command of the lieutenant governor, who was my childhood friend Lynda. Sometimes, on a television news clip, Mom and I would catch a glimpse of her handing out medals or giving a speech. “Didn’t she turn out wonderful?” my mother always said. “She looks so tall and elegant.”
Once Lynda had finished high school, with her baby and a new husband, she went on to university in Saskatoon. She’d become a specialist on learning disabilities, later a psychologist, then leader of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party. Now she was lieutenant governor of the province.
After the gala’s curtain call, the performers had lined up on stage. The Queen and Prince Philip walked through the line, pausing before a couple of us to say a word or two. My mother had been in the audience. The evening, May 19, had coincided with her eighty-seventh birthday.
“She said I was a great duster.”
Mom laughed, remembering my childhood fantasy. Her laugh was robust, not the nervous one that used to punctuate much of what she said, funny or not. The hardest I’d ever heard her laugh was the day she had told Patrick and me about putting Dad’s hearing aid through the wash by mistake. Since then, he’d complained about it making a racket. It had screeched so much he didn’t want to wear it. “I haven’t told him,” she’d said. “He’d be so disgusted with me.” She’d laughed so outrageously that tears had run down her face and her belly jiggled.
“C’mon now,” she said. “Tell me about the Queen.”
“She said wasn’t it wonderful that Lynda and I had been friends since we were children.” Lynda, who’d sat beside the Queen during the gala, must have told her about us growing up together.
“Lynda was so much bigger than you,” Mom said. “She used to twirl you around and let you drop as if you didn’t have any bones. I was afraid you’d get hurt.”
“Remember when she got mad at you,” I said—neither Lynda nor I could remember why—“and threw dirt on the sheets you’d just hung on the line? She still feels guilty about that.”
Clouds gathered on the horizon and began dragging their shadows over the far end of the field. They glided towards us like barges carrying a heavy freight. Everyone would be praying their cargo was rain.
“Mom,” I said, “I have so many questions I wish I’d asked you.”
“That’s the way it goes,” she said.
“Not even big ones, but little things. Like what year did Dad work at the horse plant, and what did he do there? Did he kill horses?”
“So many things I wanted to ask my own mother,” she said. “Most of them amounted to nothing—recipes, how to sew in a zipper so it wouldn’t look puckery, the words to the song she used to sing when she was ironing with that old flat iron that burnt your hand so easily. The most important one I couldn’t ask: why she didn’t love me?”
“Mom, are you coming back? Can we talk some more?”
A silence fell between us. It was like the one I’d felt every Sunday morning since her death, when I wanted to pick up the phone and punch in our old number, the one I’d memorized as a kid before I could even dial. I could hear the phone ringing and ringing in the house that existed now only in my mind. She wasn’t there to answer. But still I’d think: she must be out in the garden in her old shoes; she must be walking to the credit union to pay her bills or to the post office with a letter, my address in her familiar handwriting on the envelope. If it was a week before my birthday, there’d be $50 inside it, money she’d saved from her pension. The phone kept ringing. Surely someone would answer if I didn’t hang up.
“Just one question, Mom. Please, before you go. Will I get to be with you in heaven when I die?”
“What makes you think I know about heaven?” she said.
And with that, she was gone. I stood at the end of the path I’d made to my mother, the wheat field spinning its gold around me. I raised my arms above my head and gestured wildly, but no one that I could see was waving back.
first cause: story
OVER WHIST and gin rummy, during chicken plucking and berry picking, after baseball games in the pasture among cow pies, the stories come as talk and chatter. Your parents were only children during the Dirty Thirties, but you could swear you lived through that time with them. “You’ll never know what it was like,” your mother says, but you do, you do. Her words recast the light, spin the earth into dust the wind never stops turning over and over in its restless hands.
Not yet born, invisible, you stand beside your mother as she slips into the flour-sack pyjamas her mother stitched by hand. You feel the coarseness of the cotton on your skin. You squish your toes inside the shoes that never fit. At Christmas, you breathe in the rare citrus smell of the orange that must be shared among seven children, the youngest sister getting a whole one to herself because she was ill as a baby and has curly hair. By the barn, you watch your grandfather hitch his horses to the wagon and drive to town to wait in line for the train from the East. He hates being there, but he doesn’t let it show. He uses the time to visit with his neighbours, though he keeps his back straight and looks down the tracks with blue eyes leached a paler blue by the sky’s cloudless stare.
The train at last arrives with apples and hay from Ontario, smoked cod from Newfoundland, turnips that taste sweet—the few grown at home are bitter—clothes that carry the smell and grime of those who’ve outgrown them. Sometimes, mixed in with the fraying wool sweaters and pants with see-through knees, there are books with brittle yellow pages. To your delight, a few have pages missing. You claim one as your own, fill in where the story pauses before it picks up again. You change the setting, using the names of your birthplace. You call up the sere images you’ve inherited as you have your freckled skin and your mother’s fretting, her capacity for worry and hard work. This ache, this country of wind and dust and sky, is your starting point, the way you understand yourself, the place you return to when there’s nowhere else to
go. It is the pared-down language of your blood and bones.
Your words go deeper, darkened by drought’s long shadow. It sweeps across the fields and towns and everything that lives here, even in the cities with their glass and concrete and watered greens. Wherever you go, you speak with the earth on your tongue, in the accent passed down for generations. It’s a lengthening of vowels, a dusty drawl thin enough to be carried some distance by the wind.
acknowledgements
MY DEEPEST APPRECIATION goes to Patrick Lane, for his love and belief in me. I also want to thank Rob Sanders, who encouraged me to write this book, and Barbara Pulling, who did more than her usual inspired line-by-line editing. She helped me find the shape of the book and gave me the perspective I needed to complete it. There is no editor like her. My thanks also go to the Swift Current Museum for assisting me with my research. Finally, my thanks to the University of Victoria for its support of my research and to the Saskatchewan Writers/ Artists Colony at St. Peter’s Abbey, where I wrote the early drafts of this book. To my brother, Barry, to Ona and to Lynda, apologies for any factual errors I might have made, and a warm thank you for letting me tell our stories and use your real names. In several other cases, I have changed people’s names.
The book’s epigraph comes from Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962–1992 by John Newlove (Porcupine’s Quill, 1993). John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet (Blooms–bury, 2005) inspired the last chapter. Its title, “Not Waving but Drowning,” comes from Stevie Smith; it is the title of her poetry collection published in 1957 by Andre Deutsch. The quote from the Talmud, along with the description of the Mycenaean Greek afterlife and their name for the dead referred to in “My Mother for a Long Time,” come from Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being (Vintage, 2000).
Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in Geist, Focus, Perfectly Secret: The Hidden Lives of Seven Teen Girls, Dropped Threads and Dropped Threads 3.
Small Beneath the Sky Page 15