Nocturne

by Helen Humphreys

  17

  Everything holds memory. A house will remember a person after he’s gone by the slight sway in the floorboards in the front room at the window where he used to stand for hours. It remembers the pot of geraniums on the back porch by the faded circle in the grey paint. We move through spaces that have held onto other lives and will learn the shape of ours, will hold onto the way we walk through rooms, how we touch what we touch. Buildings are alive. Land has memory. Water running underground sounds like a woman crying.

  Flotsam once meant everything afloat that was not owned. Wrack was the black line on the beach that marked the stranding point for cast-up seaweed and ship’s wreckage. A skyscraper was the highest triangular sail on a fully rigged ship. A guzzle was a place where storms had once crossed and might cross again—a low, perhaps damp spot on an estuary or inland from a beach, as far inland sometimes as to be a field, where the sea could enter if it so chose. It is a place that is a ghost, that only exists under certain conditions, when water remembers where it went and what it once touched; when it imagines the shape it once filled and held, when it remembers itself.

  In the summer of 1892 August Strindberg tried to photograph the human soul. The soul he tried to photograph was his own with a series of blurry, black and white portraits. In one, he stares out at the camera, eyes dark and defiant, his overcoat undone. He is standing in front of a wooden door. The door rises like a sail behind him as though the weight of this act, the baring of his soul, has sunk him down inside the frame, a human shipwreck.

  Everything becomes a memorial. This wooden chair is a memorial to that tree.

  The rock is memorial to the mountain. The shadow is memorial to the sun. Everything comes undone. The story is memorial to the experience.

  When I swim in the river at the cottage, I swim over a rock. I know it’s large because I first discovered it by banging my foot on it. I know it’s not far under the surface. I have learned where it is by lining up objects on the banks to show me its position. When I put my feet upon it I can feel a sharp ridge on top, how the rock rises at one end, drops at the other. Sometimes there are snails attached to it, sometimes weeds. I can describe this rock without ever having seen it—but if I can’t see it, then what am I describing?

  Something exists more fully as an object when it isn’t described. The description is merely another object. The story alters the object. It doesn’t experience it.

  This space that I write these words down in is the space after the music has left. It is that silence in the concert hall after the last note of the piano has been struck and held and the whispers of that note hush down to nothing, to the emotions left by the music, to the memory of sound.

  I think of you sometimes as part of the piano, your body simply an extension of the keys. You must have felt both liberated and oppressed by the fact that the music lived through you, that you were responsible for making it happen, that without your body to animate it there was only silence.

  You used to move your hands all the time, your fingers tapping out notes on the tabletop at the bar, or on the legs of your jeans, jammed into your pockets, or smoothing your long hair back. You hummed, and sometimes sang a note straight out, in perfect pitch, to demonstrate a sound or harmonize with another sound. You had played music for so long that, in a sense, you were music.

  They tied your hands down in the hospital because you kept moving them. They were afraid you’d rip out the ventilator and the PICC line from your neck, and so they restrained you and kept you sedated. And you certainly tried to do these things the nurses were afraid of you doing, but I wonder too if your hands just wanted to move because they were so used to moving over the piano keys. From the age of four, you had played the piano for hours every day and your body still remembered this, even when your mind was juiced up on morphine.

  Maybe when you died what left your body, following the last few staccato beats of your racing heart, the last harsh gasping of your breath, was not so much your soul as the last true notes of you.

  18

  I wasn’t where I was supposed to be today. I begged off going to a party at the last minute and went instead for a long walk with the dog. This happens a lot these days; I just can’t follow through with all my social obligations. Conversation becomes difficult, and more often than not I simply have nothing to say to other people.

  I wanted to find that apple with the pinkish flesh that I had discovered a few weeks ago, so I took Charlotte back through the fields to the tree where the apple had grown. A local gardener had named the apple for me when I described it to her—a Scarlet Pippin—particular to this region of Ontario, this lake country around Kingston, first planted here by settlers in the early 1800s.

  The Scarlet Pippin is an early apple that ripens in August and so there was nothing left on the tree when I got there, just a few shrivelled apples lying in the long grass beneath it. I was disappointed, although I don’t know why I expected the fruit to still be on the tree. But time has become complicated since you died. Sometimes it collapses entirely, so that a few weeks take on the shape and texture of a single day, and sometimes an hour stretches out as an endless plain before me and I cannot see to the other side of it. I can’t seem to negotiate time as well as I did before. It just seems to happen to me, like an accident.

  The Scarlet Pippin wasn’t there, but when I looked down the field I saw another apple tree, laden with fruit, and beyond that and to the right, another tree. There were three other apple trees in that field, the remains, clearly, of an old orchard. Each tree grew a different variety of apple. I picked samples from the three trees and carried them home in my sweater, so that I could identify them. But before that, I stood in the long grass and ate one apple from each of the three trees. One was sweet, one tart, and one had an oblong shape with hard, white flesh. In apple terminology, an oblong shape is called oblate.

  I have become a little obsessed with apples since you died, with the small orchard that I’m trying to grow at the cottage. I’m not sure why exactly, but I’ve learned not to question anything these days. Like a child, or an animal perhaps, I simply move towards what feels good and move away from what feels bad. Taking care of the fruit trees at the cottage feels right, and so I put my limited energies and focus there.

  My orchard is still too young to properly produce, and the trees that have shown the most promise are the pears and the cherries, but it is the apples that have my attention. It is the apples I gravitate towards.

  I like that apple trees are all individuals, that no two trees are alike, and even if a seed from one apple is planted, the tree that grows from that seed will not have exactly the same apples as the first tree. It is endlessly possible to make new varieties of apples by grafting one variety onto the rootstock of another, or even by grafting one variety onto a branch of another, so that the branch will grow one type of apple and the rest of the tree will grow another.

  I like that there are all these old lost orchards in southern Ontario. Sometimes there is only a single tree remaining, and sometimes, as here, there are several trees, each growing a different variety of apple. I can graft pieces of the old trees onto my new trees and, in that way, preserve some of the old species, even though the new apples that grow will not be completely the same as the old.

  But grafting is about bringing something back, keeping something alive, moving the essence of something from one place to another, from one body to another.

  Down the river from my cottage, out past habitation, in the wild part that resembles the everglades, a single apple tree hangs over the water. It produces a fruit that is related to a Snow apple at the end of September. The field behind the tree is a tangle of bushes and brambles, with no sign of a building, and yet once there must have been an old farmhouse there, someone must have planted that apple tree with other apple trees, and those trees would have been part of the fruit source for that family. Early apples for eating. Late apples for cider and sauce.

  The spring afte
r you died I took a couple of grafting courses, because I want to wander out in the world and find these old trees, bring pieces of them back to my young orchard and grow new fruit that tastes of the old fruit.

  I like the laws of grafting:

  When planting a whip grafted onto rootstock, always bury the graft so that the new tree doesn’t have to spend energy trying to protect it.

  Protect the graft because it is vulnerable. New growth is vulnerable, and will burn or freeze first.

  Never graft into a colder season.

  An orchard is an assembly, a community. The trees produce fruit at different times, but they are united in their common purpose, and they rely on one another. Many fruit trees require others of their species for cross-pollination. In this way, perhaps, an orchard is a conversation among the various trees. The trees, although single entities, are always in relation to one another. A conversation. A family.

  There’s a choreography to an orchard. Over time, some of the trees in an orchard will have died due to disease or age, and new ones will have been planted in their place. Or, the orchardist might have removed certain trees in favour of other ones that are more suited to growing there. The family of a friend had a peach orchard in Niagara for generations, but they ripped it out in favour of planting cherry trees because they could make more money from running a pick-your-own cherry orchard than they could from selling peaches.

  An orchard is a society, but an orchard is also a place—a temple, an orchestrated wildness, a space made by humans that doesn’t look human. The way an orchard is planted and re-planted becomes a conversation, not just among the trees, but across the generations of people who tend the orchard. The new owners of an orchard act in response to the decisions made by former owners. Orchards are always full of wildlife. The fruit attracts birds and insects and squirrels, raccoons and deer. An orchard offers itself equally to the air and to the earth.

  The grandfather we never knew, Dad’s father, who died in the war, shot down in a Wellington bomber over the Mediterranean one March night on his way to take control of an airbase in Malta at the age of forty-five (the same age you were when you died)—he always wanted to have an orchard. He had been called out of retirement to fly this one last mission, but his plan for after the war ended was to move his family to Trail, British Columbia, and start a fruit farm.

  It was a strange dream for an Englishman, but he had spent a few years in his early twenties in Vancouver and Victoria, and maybe he had travelled outside the cities and seen the orchards then, and the impression of them had remained with him, through both world wars and through his time in Singapore and England. I sometimes wonder if any of the trees I am planting in my small orchard are trees that he would have planted in his, if we are having a conversation this way, across the years, across death itself.

  There’s an old orchard I see when I drive the highway back and forth between Kingston and Toronto. The trees are huge, in need of pruning, clearly not tended, but still producing prolifically. When it’s apple season the orchard is filled with horses from the neighbouring farm, contentedly eating the fallen fruit.

  I like that orchards are planted for food, not decoration, as gardens are, that their reason for being is human hunger and their success or failure is tied to that hunger, and since hunger is tied to desire, there is something of the erotic in an orchard, something of desire itself. It’s not hard to see how the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit originated.

  Right after you died I tried to write, but there seemed nothing to say. But I’ve been a writer all my life and, like the muscle memory in an athlete, my writing memory is hard to stop, even when the motivation is gone. I had nothing to say, no story to tell, but I needed to write, and so I worked for a couple of hours every morning simply copying out the salient details from an encyclopedia of apples published in 1905.

  I didn’t get very far with my apple notations, only to the Arthur apple, but the routine helped. It’s how I’ve always taught myself something, to start at the beginning and just keep going through to the end, systematically. When I graduated from high school, instead of attending university I went to the local library and started reading from A in the Literature section. That took longer than I’d bargained for and I only got to M before skipping ahead to W so that I could read the novels and diaries of Virginia Woolf.

  So I wrote down the descriptions of the apples from the encyclopedia, and often, interspersed with the descriptions, I wrote down what I could of how I was feeling. When I look through the notebook now, it’s a jumble of things: Allison—valuable winter apple from Tennessee—oblate, rather strongly ribbed, sides unequal, rather uniform—heavily splashed with large and small russet patches—nearly sweet—late winter. And that description followed by: Grief enjoys shorthand, that’s what I’m thinking today. Narrative is too fluid. Grief is all chop, all rhythm and breaks, broken. It is the lurch of the heart, not the steady beating of it.

  I turn to that same apple catalogue to identify the three trees in the old orchard that I found today. Baldwin. Tolman Sweet. Yellow Pearmain.

  19

  I’m on a train, riding through the flat southwestern Ontario landscape in the early morning. The sun isn’t up yet, but the horizon is tinged pink with the promise of it. The clouds are low, dark streaks over the fields.

  There was a beautiful sunrise on the December morning that you died. I woke early in your new apartment that day and just lay there in the dark for a while before getting up. Mum had arrived by then and I had given her your bed. I slept on the divan in the living room, in a sort of propped-up position that was not as uncomfortable as it had seemed it might be. Sleeping in the front room was noisy because Hastings Street was right outside the window and there was always traffic moving up and down it, day or night. I liked waking early in your apartment and lying in the dark looking at your books in the bookcases, your pictures stacked against the walls. Your possessions were comforting, familiar. I had woken to these same objects many times over the years, in all of the places you had lived.

  After you died, when I was coming back to your apartment to clean it out, I was looking forward to seeing your space with your things as you had arranged them. But there had been an infestation of bedbugs in your building in my absence, and your landlady had sprayed your apartment, and to do that she’d had to move everything away from the walls, so that your stuff was just a piled jumble in the centre of each room. All the careful placement of your items, that delicate arrangement, gone.

  The sunrise was visible from the hospital corridor windows on the walk to your room in the ICU. I remember stopping at the windows for a moment before continuing in to see you, and just watching the deep red of the sky. That afternoon, after you died, the sky was the same colour over the mountains on the way out of the hospital. It almost felt as if time hadn’t advanced at all, that the hours between the sunrise and sunset had never happened.

  When I stood at the window that morning, watching the sunrise, I knew that you were going to die that day. The doctor had said to us the afternoon before, “We need to think about letting him go.”

  This sunrise isn’t quite as good as that one. Maybe the cold air over the mountains helped to stain the sky such a dark red that morning. Here, the space above the fields is infused with pink, a smudge of colour over the dark trees.

  I’m on my way back from a reading. The book we went to Paris to research is finally out and I’ve been travelling around to promote it. Maybe you would like it, Martin. I’m not sure, because you never read my books. I don’t know why. You kept all my reviews, though. I found them after you died. I asked you several times why you didn’t read my books, but you never gave me a real answer. In the last few months you did make an effort to right this, by starting one of my novels, but you only got to page 54.

  My novel was by your bed in your Vancouver apartment when I got there. I guess you were still trying to read it. The objects in the orbit of a bed are the objects most in use
, and that was certainly the case with you. The space around your bed was strewn with books, papers, your cell phone and charger, clothes, a glass of water. Everything you needed, every night, close at hand.

  I used to be upset that you didn’t read my books, but it no longer matters. I understand that it cost you to be a child prodigy, that starting piano so young and having an art that was public meant that for years, you felt people only liked you for your music, and not for yourself.

  Two women are sitting behind me on the train. They’ve been talking the whole time, crazy talk. “I used to have a lot of friends before my head injury,” one of them says. The other one counters with, “Do you know what the leading cause of death for women in Canada is? Urinary tract infections.” I love every crazy sentence that comes out of their mouths. I love their absolute belief that they’re being ripped off, and that everything that happens to them is someone else’s fault.

  The sun is up now, Martin, and the fields are gold and green, and the trees mass green at the edges, and the train lurches forward, and the sunrise has evaporated, and this day is fully underway.

  20

  You were practising three piano pieces during the fall you were dying. The first was the Menuet antique by Ravel, the piece you told Mum was like a prayer.

  The Menuet was the first of Ravel’s compositions to be published. It was a piece written in youth, when he was twenty years old. Like you, Ravel was an owl rather than a lark, preferring to work at night, and often taking long walks in the dark. He liked the darkness so much that he had the shapes of stars cut into the wooden shutters in his house, so he could imagine the night sky during the daylight hours.

  Music was his only intimate and he never married or, apparently, had lovers. He embraced the loneliness of being an artist, or fell into it so far that he couldn’t climb back out again. It always amuses me when people refer to this way of living as a “choice” because it certainly doesn’t feel that way. To turn towards creative work is, by necessity, to turn away from human society. It is not really a choice; the drive to do this, the pull, comes from somewhere outside oneself. I feel this, and I know that you did too. And clearly Ravel, for all of his sixty-two years on earth, felt it as well.