The Memento
Page 36
Down the dirt road we drove back to Petal’s End. For a moment I thought I could hear Ma saying not to call her fucking Mrs. Mosher, and Jenny reciting her peculiar chants, and I glimpsed that white thing in the white dress with the hands clasped, standing by the side of the road as we turned into Petal’s End. Lifting her head, and eyes full of the pond, swans and ripples. Art said later I spoke out as though in a pulpit, proclaiming, There ain’t nothing mild about mercy … when you call for Holy Mother Mercy she don’t always come alone. In the shadow of her skirts comes Sweet Sister Vengeance.
When we come through the wildwood, back from the funeral, there were petals from the house to Evermore, the path laid out, and Dr. Baker’s car was parked there in the driveway, the keys still in the ignition, as though the car was waiting to be moved back by the carriage house. We ran across that trail of petals, crushing them into the grass and gravel. The door to Evermore was locked from the inside. Art got a ladder so we could go over the top and then down from a tree. We followed the petals to the pond.
Jenny was in a lawn chair, her eyes open behind her glasses. There was a teacup broken at her feet, a pot of tea on the table beside her, the swans at her side. In her fingers was a long-stemmed rose. And face down in the pond, like you had been in the brook, Melissa, were Dr. Baker and Estelle, their legs caught in metal bear traps that had been thrown in the water some time before.
Later it was reported that the swans had beat Estelle and Dr. Baker in the head, hit them hard with their massive bony wings, beating them as they protected their cygnets. Estelle and Dr. Baker had stopped in their tracks from the shock of seeing Jenny sweating profusely, her face mottled and red. And in that moment the swans had attacked them and they had fallen into the pond and stumbled into the traps below the surface. There they drowned as Jenny sat before them in her lawn chair and sipped her mortal petal tea, every wicked blossom she could find, the foxglove and monkshood, brewed and steeped in silver, and sipped from a delicate china cup. She wore all the horror of her life and death. Her wind bells hung silent in the weeping willow tree.
After Art called the police, there was sirens and vehicles and a commotion that hadn’t afflicted the estate since the final garden party twelve years earlier. Of course we knew the truth, for it was in my embroidery.
Art took me away to my room where I slept deeply, for a long time. Petal’s End went to the Nature Conservancy, with us to live there as long as we wanted, Art and me, and our children, the sweet ones with their own now, who will come and find me here, for Art has been gone some years. In the picture you see how he fell in the flowers along the stone wall of Evermore, the hoe still in his hand.
I wonder if you’ve been here all this time, Melissa, as I’ve told this story of the years you knew, and the years that were taken from you. It was your favourite time for a story, when the evening came. The stitches I put in now, of the old lady in the rocking chair on the verandah—they show a wrinkled woman who looks asleep, but if you look careful you see she is still and her arms hang down, that she has fallen into a sleep she will never wake from, her eyes gazing ahead. There is an embroidery hoop on the verandah floor, and the little girl stands by the mirror and she is holding out her hand. Below the picture is stitched in finest silk floss:
On the wings of the wind o’er the dark rolling deep
Angels are coming to watch o’er thy sleep
Angels are coming to watch over thee
So listen to the wind coming over the sea.
I see you now. I am a twelfth-born Mosher, and when the dead appear in the mirror by the door it is time. Holy Mother Mercy sending you, perhaps, a gift for carrying the memento all these years. We walk through the meadow, leaving a path behind us in the tall grasses. The wind blows the path away and there is only an untouched field of sweet hay and late-summer flowers swaying under the enormous singing sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ONGOING GRATITUDE to the fiercely talented Kiara Kent, literary editor with the heart of a dramaturge. Thank you for such intellectual elegance, rigour and devotion to the novel. Endless thanks also to associate publisher Amy Black for kindness, wisdom and guidance.
Thank you to Kristin Cochrane, Susan Burns, Catherine Marjoribanks and the team at Doubleday Canada. Thanks to Mr. Five Seventeen who beautifully carried the world of the story into book format. Special thanks to Maya Mavjee, the first to believe in this novel, and to Lynn Henry. Thanks also to Lynne Reeder for salty Nova Scotian encouragement along the way.
My gratitude to artist and dearest friend Marie Cameron. The End of Spring graces the cover, a painting inspired by a photograph I took of a dead bird which fell on my door step during the writing.
Deep appreciation to Kent Hoffman and Mary Lynk for expert guidance through various forms of storytelling and understanding the power of voice. Thanks to the Box of Delights Bookstore in Wolfville, Nova Scotia and the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia for steadfast encouragement.
Abiding appreciation for Sara Keddy’s affection for the old mountain and valley ways. Thanks Dana Mills and Meaghan Franey for those literary coffees. Thank you Melanie Little, Madeleine Thien, Barbara Lipp, Yvette Doucette, Millie & Maurice Laporte, Pat Acheson, Scott Campbell, and Waldo Walsh & Judy Noel Walsh at Birchleigh Farm. Thank you to Dr. Beverley Cassidy; to Dr. Chris Toplack for research on DES; and to Lois Hare, ND, for discussion of deadly flowers. I would like to also acknowledge the support of the Woodcock Fund through the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
Thank you Atsuko Tomita Poirier and Sarah Jane Blenkhorn for sharing their knowledge of traditional Japanese ghost stories and cultural practices. Thanks also to the work of Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th century writer who wrote extensively in English about Japanese culture and ancient texts. Thank you, Joan Levack, for unwavering encouragement from the very start, and the life changing vintage floral card table. Thanks to the effervescence that is Sheree Fitch.
Thank you Dan Conlin, helpful historian and big brother—for traditional Nova Scotia ghost stories told by island beach fires.
Gratitude to Gwenyth Dwyn and Bruce Dienes for never, ever doubting, not even once, and for your sea of kindness and love of eccentricity. A profound thanks to Joceline & Martin Doucette for the espressos and everything else.
And of course, sparkly thanks to my marvelous son, Silas, with me through the long journey of the book. Thanks to sweet Milo and Angus, and to the loving miracle that is Andy Brown—he has kept the home fires burning, the graphic novels flowing and the lamp glowing in the long dark nights.