The Waiting Place

by Sharron Arksey

  “Shhh,” she said, holding my head against her quite ample chest. “All things have their time, my girl.”

  At first I was upset with her for calling my dog a thing. Eventually I figured out that she wasn’t just talking about dogs or people. She was talking about everything.

  Grandma was like an oak tree with its roots so firmly planted it couldn’t move far. But it could reach with its branches and its roots stretched in every direction far below where no one could see.

  Those roots were her strength. Death was a stroke of lightning.

  Once when I was picking Saskatoons I came across a poplar tree with a swash of red fabric tied around its trunk. I didn’t realize at first what it was until Glen explained it to me. I had heard about it before, but this was the first time I had seen it for myself.

  We live not far from a First Nations reserve. When a First Nations person dies, those who grieve may select a tree in his memory. The fabric wrapped around the trunk may be from an item of clothing once worn by the deceased or perhaps it might be his favourite colour. The tree is readily identified by its sash and can be visited as others might visit a grave. The idea being, I suppose, that the spirit lives on in living things. Perhaps I could borrow from a culture that is not mine and pick a tree for my grandma. I would like it to be an oak tree, but I suppose any kind of tree might do.

  The funeral service was followed by interment at the same cemetery where my grandfather was buried. It was a grey day and, although the temperature was seasonal, the wind sliced through me. I shivered in the winter coat that refused to close around my belly and Glen put an arm around my shoulders.

  Then back to the community hall in town for the lunch. Coffee and tea, towering plates of egg salad and ham sandwiches, bowls of pickles, more plates of cake and cookies. Funeral food. Sometimes I think that people come to funerals just for the food.

  Grace said by the minister, eating and drinking, and then the line-up to greet family members. So sorry for your loss. She was a grand lady. Hugs from people I did not recognize. Finally we could go back to Mom and Dad’s, where aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered for yet more coffee and food. A Tupperware container of leftovers had been thrust upon us as we left the hall.

  Glen and I were the last to leave Mom and Dad’s that evening and I helped Mom clear up the coffee cups and cake plates.

  “Do you like university?” I asked her. It was the first time I had had a chance to talk to her about her new life.

  “It’s harder than I thought,” she said. “It’s a long time since I’ve been a student. I’ve forgotten how to study. But yes, I’m enjoying the courses. I’m looking at things in a new way.”

  “I’d forgotten how city people think of us,” she added.

  “They don’t think of us at all.”

  “You’re right, Susan. They don’t.”

  “We know more about the city than the city knows about us.”

  “A smart mouse always keeps track of what the elephant is doing.”

  “I guess.”

  I grew bored with the conversation, brought it back to the family.

  “I thought you were leaving Dad,” I blurted out.

  Mom stopped washing cutlery and looked at me.

  “When you told us at Christmas, that’s the first thing I thought.”

  “I see,” she said. And then, “No, I wasn’t planning that. In some ways I wasn’t thinking of your dad at all. I just wanted to begin something new. Think about different things.

  “This is my grand adventure,” my mother said as she reached for another handful of coffee spoons.

  “You wouldn’t ever want to leave Dad, would you?”

  “Well, you know, Susan, there are very few marriages, probably none at all, that don’t go through bad times. Times when you look at the man you married and ask yourself, ‘what am I doing here?’ Times when he doesn’t like you very much and you don’t like him very much and it would be very easy to say to heck with it.

  “But no, I’m not likely to leave your Dad, not voluntarily anyway. And I doubt that he would ever leave me. Even if sometimes we both wonder about what life might be like somewhere else. Everybody does. You get to a point in your life where you say ‘Is this all there is?’”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  “I guess maybe Glen and I are lucky. We fit together,” I said.

  “Do you remember that farm puzzle you used to play with?” Mom asked.

  I did. It had been Jon’s originally and was handed down to me and then to Sam. Each heavy wooden piece featured a different farm animal. When you put the puzzle together, you had a farm scene. I loved that puzzle.

  “Whatever happened to it?”

  “It’s upstairs in one of the closets. It’s missing one piece—the pig, I think.”

  “So why have you kept it?”

  Mom gave me this look that said I should be able to figure it out for myself. It annoyed me and we finished the dishes in silence.

  Sam came up behind us, draping his arms around our shoulders.

  “Aw, am I too late to help with the dishes?” he asked.

  “Your timing is perfect,” I said.

  I had coffee with Sam early the next afternoon before his flight home.

  “You’re being kinda hard on Mom, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, hard on Mom?”

  “Just because she wants to expand her horizons a little. This family is so tied to the land and its rituals. I don’t blame her for wanting to see beyond that.”

  “You love the land, too.”

  “Yes, those roots pull you back. But I don’t want to live here. You can bury me beside Grandma and Grandpa.”

  I shivered.

  “You’re being morbid.”

  “You live and then you die,” he said and grinned.

  Another of Grandpa’s famous lines. They’re never going to die as long as people keep repeating them.

  “You know what, Susan? I think you hide yourself inside the barn so you don’t have to deal with the big bad world.”

  “What a weird thing to say, Sam. I’m not hiding from it. I’m living in the thick of it, birth and death and everything in between.”

  “The world according to Moo,” he said.

  “Oh shut up,” I answered, but my tone belied the words. Sam was the only person I knew who could make me want to laugh and swear at the same time.

  Perhaps because he is the baby of the family, Sam is good at silliness.

  “I think I like living in the midst of ordinary vices,” I said. “No gang warfare, no organized crime, no terrorism.”

  “Ah, but the seeds of all that heavy duty stuff are in those ordinary vices you talk about,” my little brother said.

  “I’m glad you’re here, even if it’s just for a short time,” I said. “You’re one of the few people in the world that I can have this kind of conversation with.”

  “What kind of conversation?”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I’m talking about. A conversation that isn’t all about cattle and grain and farming and weather.”

  NINE

  Things that come in nines. That’s an easy one. Nine months of pregnancy. Nine planets in the solar system. Men Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular. Mars Venus Earth Mercury Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto. Except now they say that Pluto might not be a planet. So maybe the planets belong to things that come in eights instead. But I will not go back there. Nine lives of a cat. Nine innings in a baseball game. Take me out to the ball game. Possession is nine points of the law. Cloud nine. Dressed to the nines. The whole nine yards.

  Two, four, six, eight.

  What will I appreciate?

  When dilation gets to ten

  Cuz I will never go this way again.


  Ah, but women do, don’t they? Mom told me that you forget the pain between pregnancies. If men had to give birth, she said, there would be zero population growth. Men don’t forget as easily. I don’t see how I could possibly forget.

  I feel greasy and huge, my legs splayed out under a hospital-issue blanket. You’re doing great, the nurses tell me. Glen says so, too. He doesn’t know what else to say. Maybe he should go buy some more staples.

  March was difficult, full of spite and broken promises: a spring thaw and sunshine one day, snow and ice storms the next.

  On nice days, I waddled out to the barnyard through grey mud that was soft and sludge-like beneath my boots. The young calves were quick on their newly-found feet. They ran and jumped around the corrals, then returned to their mothers for a feed and snuggle. When the baby kicked, I imagined him with that same joyous energy. My mother said I was going to have a boy because of the way I carried this child—straight out and to the front. That’s a boy, she said.

  The calves knew me by then. They no longer ran away when I approached. I patted them with my right hand while rubbing my belly with my left. Sometimes I would stretch an ungloved hand towards one and it would mistake my hand for a teat, latching on with vacuum-like strength.

  One morning I let myself into the pen of the calving barn to see the newest arrival. The cow pricked up its ears and turned towards me, the whites of its eyes a blaze in the brown of its face. I barely had time to get out and latch the panels together before she was there, head lowered and nostrils flaring. If I hadn’t had the chain lock in place, she would have head butted me.

  “We need to get rid of that cow,” I told Glen once my breathing had returned to normal. We had said the same thing last year. She was a docile creature for fifty weeks out of fifty-two, but when her calf was new, she became a warrior. It was one of the first things Dad taught me when I began working with the cattle at home. Bulls you never trust ever. Cows you never trust when they have young calves at foot. So what almost happened was my own fault; I should not have tried to enter the pen.

  With another cow, however, it would not have been such a big deal. She would have watched me carefully, but probably would not have come near me unless I attempted to come near her calf.

  This cow was different. For several weeks after the calf was born, she wasn’t just protective. She was murderous. If there is a bovine equivalent of post-partum psychosis, she showed all the symptoms.

  But her first calf had been one of the best in the herd last year and she was so quiet normally that we had forgotten her Jekyll and Hyde transformation.

  “We have to sell her this year,” Glen said. “We can’t have a cow like that around the place now that there’ll be little kids around.”

  I noticed that he said “kids” plural and thought he was rushing things a bit. Let’s get this pregnancy over before you plan another one, I thought. Besides, it would be several years before our first child started exploring the barnyard on his own. But I knew what Glen meant. This cow had to go.

  My father-in-law made a point of driving out to the farm almost daily. Although retired, he couldn’t get over the habits of a lifetime, I guess. He had discovered caution in his senior years, especially after he suffered a stroke in his early sixties, and he didn’t chance the semi-frozen and rutted corrals. Instead he drove up to the gate, opened the window, and watched from the safety and warmth of his vehicle. I could tell he wanted to get out there and touch some hides the way I did.

  At the same time, I was amazed at how far he had come since his stroke. We all were.

  ~ Joan ~

  Wires stretch from my husband to machines beside the hospital bed. Coloured lights flicker on the front of the machines.

  “What do the lights mean?” I ask the nurse.

  But her answer does not help me much. I am not surprised. Both Joe and I have sisters who are nurses. Whenever the two of them talk shop, my internal remote switches channels. They speak a language I don’t understand.

  As far as I can figure out, the lights flicker because Joe’s condition is not stable. And the appearance of red lights would be a bad thing, like a stop sign at the end of the road. Red lights would bring the medical staff running.

  Joe’s sleep is restless, broken by guttural noises and gasps for air. His face seems foreign, inert and plastic, the features melting one into the other. When I cover his hand with mine, there is no response.

  The doctor on call told me that Joe had a stroke and asked about the family medical history. His mother died of a heart attack, I told the doctor. His father died of cancer. You don’t ever beat the big C, Joe used to say.

  We were having a late night cup of tea before bed.

  “First thing in the morning,” Joe started to say and I knew before the sentence was completed what the words were going to be. First thing in the morning we would move the cattle from one paddock to another.

  But the words did not come and I looked up from the cup I was spooning sugar into. Joe’s face was skewed; his mouth moved but there was no sound. I stood up to go to him but could not get there fast enough to halt his slide to the floor.

  I called 9-1-1. Joe hates ambulances. I was sure he would tell me to hang up the phone. No need for that, I expected him to say. He said nothing.

  I could have ridden in the ambulance, but I said that no, I would bring the car. If I didn’t bring a vehicle, how would I get home? But in the forty-five minutes it took to get to the emergency ward, I wished I had made a different choice. The closer we got to the hospital, the more convinced I became that Joe had died with only the ambulance attendant beside him. I watched the ambulance attendants roll Joe’s stretcher into the emergency entrance and tried to get up the courage to follow them inside.

  I remembered the cows in the west pasture, the ones that Joe, I was sure, had intended to move in the morning. First thing when I get home, I told myself. Poor things will be hungry. They had eaten the grass down to its roots. With that purpose, I felt strong enough to leave the car.

  Emergency was busy. Blood soaked the fabric wound around a man’s hand.

  “I was trying to unplug the lawn mower,” I heard the man say.

  “Can you help my wife?” another man asked. “She got stung and she’s allergic.”

  A bone was sticking out of a young boy’s arm. He stared at it with fascination, while his mother talked to the nurses.

  They wouldn’t let me see Joe. “Wait out here,” they said. “We’ll come for you.”

  I called Lynne. “Your dad had a stroke,” I told her.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know. Please come as soon as you can.”

  Glen had gone fishing with a group of friends. Cell phone reception up there is non-existent.

  By the time Lynne and Brian arrive, Joe has been moved to a bed in ICU. The nurse has set up a cot for me, but I cannot sleep. I blame it on the blinking lights. I am afraid to close my eyes in case they turn red.

  “Mom,” Lynne says, and I stand up to hug her. The nurse brings more chairs and the three of us settle down to watch and wait. What’s that they say? Hurry up and wait.

  “I talked to the nurse outside,” Brian says, reaching for my hand. “She says it’s serious.”

  Hours later, as daylight peeks through the vertical blinds in the room’s one window, three doctors come in, the doctor I had seen before and two strangers. They examine Joe’s chart and fiddle with the machines. They line themselves up in front of us. “I’m sorry,” the tallest one says. “This could go either way. It was a massive stroke.”

  “But there is still a chance he could pull through?” Lynne asks.

  “Yes. But it would be wise to face the possibility that he won’t. I’m sorry.”

  I want our family doctor, but they tell us that he is on vacation, returning later this week. Dr. Ca
rter would touch me on the shoulder, spreading sympathy and strength with his fingers.

  The doctors depart with assurances that they will continue to monitor Joe closely and promises to answer any questions we might have. The blinking lights, coloured eyes in a mechanical face, have given me a headache.

  “I’m going home,” I say, standing up and reaching for my purse and car keys.

  “But aren’t you going to wait here for Dad to wake up?” Lynne asks.

  “You can wait with him,” I say. “The cattle in the west pasture need to be moved. Your dad and I were going to do it this morning. If he wakes up, tell him where I am.”

  “I think you should stay with us, Mom,” Brian says. “I could go if you’d like, and you can stay with Lynne.”

  “No, I would like to go by myself,” I say. “I need to do this. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  I leave the machines behind.

  The headache recedes as soon as I get in the car. There are cumulous clouds in the blue sky. Nothing bad can happen on such a day, I tell myself. I wish. My mom died on a sunny day. My daughter was born during a snowstorm. We farmers think that weather controls our lives, but in life’s most important moments, it is irrelevant.

  About halfway home, there is a vacant farmyard. The two-storey house is grey and weathered, no glass in the windows, roof sagging. The house has been there as long as I can remember. There used to be outbuildings as well, but over time they were vandalized or just fell down of their own accord. I have always been curious about the family who farmed that land and lived in that house. I know they left in the 1950s, selling the land to farmers who had no need for the yard site. I even know their name was Moffat and that they moved to another province where one of their adult children lived. But I know nothing about the memories inside those four walls. I do not know how the rooms were furnished, or what family dramas played out there. In my imagination, I cover the chesterfield and armchair with crocheted doilies, fill the pantry with raisin pies and place a ceramic pitcher beside the wash bowl in the bathroom.

  I like to make up stories about this and other houses, but realize now that I have never imagined vacant a house that Joe and I once lived in.