The Waiting Place

by Sharron Arksey

  What Lynne has never understood is the pleasure that can be taken in the ride, and I’m not sure whether Brian does, either. Farming to both of them is a means to an end and that means is often unsatisfactory. They have bought into the “bigger is better” philosophy. I think, too, that Lynne seeks protection in her things. When she was a little girl, she was so easily upset by life: the calf that died, the dog that got run over, the clothes she could not buy because we could not afford them. Her possessions have become a kind of insurance against bad times.

  I have always thought that Lynne and Brian made a good couple in many ways and I never worried about my daughter’s choice. I knew she would be financially secure. But Lynne would be richer if she allowed some of her dad’s quiet passion to show, not necessarily for farming, but for something she hasn’t yet found. That passion exists; she’s just very good at hiding it.

  Neither of them told us about the affair; Joe heard it at the coffee shop in town.

  “Is it true Lynne and Brian are breaking up?” someone asked him.

  “Why would they break up?” Joe asked.

  “I must have heard it wrong,” the man said, obviously trying to backtrack and change the subject.

  When I asked Lynne about it, she said, yes, they were having problems.

  “I had an affair,” she said.

  Just like that, as if she were telling me that their car broke down or they had to purchase a new furnace.

  We have always expected a certain standard of behaviour from our children and, with minor exceptions, they have lived up to those expectations. This was not minor. I’m sure Lynne could tell that from my facial expression, but her own matched mine in determination. Don’t go there.

  “I made a mistake and we’re working it out,” she said. “Don’t be so judgemental, Mother.”

  I hate it when she calls me “mother.” It means she is exasperated with me and my attitudes. She has often told me that I think in black and white with nothing in between, but that is not true. I was taught, however, that sticking to the rules helps you navigate through the greyness. You cannot get lost that way. It’s like having a map to follow. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Even having the map is no guarantee; it’s damn hard to read in a fog.

  Last night I dreamt that the children and I were visited by three vagabonds, Gypsy-like in their dress and appearance. Joe was nowhere to be found and I was a younger version of myself, although old enough to have teenage children. The three visitors—two men and a woman—took us hostage in our own house, but we showed no resistance. They danced in their bright clothes and took us flying, their billowing sleeves serving as makeshift wings. It was magic, we thought. Even in a dream, the kids and I realized that people do not fly like birds.

  One evening, the younger of the two men came to my bedroom and lay down beside me on the bed. Perhaps there was sexual activity, but I do not remember any. What I do remember—what I woke up still feeling—was an elastic longing stretched to its breaking point.

  In my dream, the older man (who was not much older than my lover, but the acknowledged leader of the group) announced the next day that their visit with us was over. The girl was ready to leave, but the young man who had spent the night with me hung back.

  He does not want to leave me, I thought. He wants me.

  The emotions engendered by the dream lasted well into the morning until reason returned. It was only a dream, I told myself, and began to make lunch for Joe and myself. At my age, dreams are the only romance I can expect. Joe and I always had a good sex life, although never a noisy one. With first parents and then children and parents just down the hallway, we never felt alone. Our lovemaking became rather inventive as a result. How far could we go without waking the family? But when Joe’s parents were gone and the kids were grown, we discovered we had forgotten how to make loud noises during sex. No matter. Nothing says physical satisfaction has to be noisy, I suppose, and we were seldom unsatisfied.

  Since Joe’s stroke, however, things have changed. Lust has been replaced by affection and I mourn the absence of passion. It is a wonderful feeling to be told that you are wanted. At some point in my life, I will hear it for the last time. A depressing thought. I don’t want to be old; maybe that is all it is. At some point in your life, everything is for the last time.

  My daughter and I are not unlike each other, I suddenly think. Both yearning for things the way they were before life got in the way.

  Standing on a step ladder to remove the drapes from the main window, I look out to the front lawn; an octagonal flower bed is emerging finally from its snow cover. Susan had added rocks and small shrubs to the display; in my day, it was planted to annuals. As if it was just last week, I can remember the first time the cows damaged that flowerbed. It happened more than once unfortunately, but the first time is clearer than any of the others. I drove home from town to find the carnage.

  A fresh plop of cow dung steamed in the driveway. I parked the car over the offending pile and looked around the yard.

  More cow pies dotted the yard, becoming shadows in the sickly green of the lawn. It had rained the evening before, an unwelcome rain in late June when we wanted to be out in the hayfields. We needed sunshine, not moisture.

  Even more cloven hoof prints marked the lawn, pitting the surface like craters in a moon made of soft green cheese. The hooves had sunk inches deep into the ground and there had been a herd of hooves.

  I placed the bag of groceries and our mail on the hood of the car and walked out onto the lawn, counting hoof prints as I went. I quit after twenty. I could also see the tread marks of an all-terrain vehicle. Someone, probably my husband Joe, had been trying to round up the cattle. To my way of thinking, he hadn’t tried hard enough.

  Tire treads and hoof prints were evidence that the animals had exited the yard through the ditch and then headed south down the road. If I had been paying more attention, I would have probably noticed the tracks on the road as I approached our yard. But I had been miles away, reliving that morning’s conversation with our bank manager. Yes, I have a deposit. Yes, I realize we’re overdrawn. Yes, I know our line of credit is up for review. Tell me something I don’t know.

  Tell me, for example, that things are going to turn around. Tell me that cattle prices are going to rebound. Tell me that it is going to quit raining and that our hay crop this year will be a bumper one.

  We were not big farmers, but we were big enough that the workload was wearing us down. We were old enough to have parents who taught us that everything is possible if you work hard enough. But all the work in the world won’t stop the rain from falling. Nor will it increase beef prices.

  What really got me was when the bank manager started talking about our daughter in university. University is expensive, he said. Where did the money come for that?

  Our daughter got a student loan, I said, because her parents could not afford tuition. She worked hard and received entrance scholarships. She had a part time job and worked hard at that, too.

  “Good for her,” he said.

  I thought uneasily of the Canada Savings Bonds nestled in our safety deposit box. When the children were small, we made an annual fall trip to the bank to purchase bonds for their education. We gave our daughter her bonds when she moved to the city. It helped pay for her books. Not a large amount by any means. Was the manager suggesting that we should have given the money to the bank instead? Did he have his eyes on the remaining contents of the box? Wouldn’t that be stealing from our kids?

  But maybe we were the ones stealing from our kids. Maybe if we weren’t trying so hard to keep this farm going, their futures would be better.

  Rehashing it all was not doing me any good. But then neither was the view.

  The octagonal flower bed at the front of the yard was a mangled mess. I had spent many winter hours planning this flower bed. There was more love in the plan
ning than in the labour. In the middle of winter, dreaming of a perfect garden gives me purpose and pleasure. I seldom come anywhere close to making those dreams come true. I am good at dreaming, not gardening.

  But that year I gave it my best. As soon as possible once the snow was gone, I made the flower bed ready. That meant coercing my husband into helping me. Together we cut the cedar tone edging into the desired lengths and made the eight-sided shape I had envisioned. We filled the inside with pail after pail of soil, adding home-grown fertilizer and store-bought nutrients as well. In my dreams, the bed contained ferns and hydrangeas. In reality, I planted petunias and marigolds. They are hardy plants—that’s why I chose them over the more exotic stuff of my dreams—but they were not hardy enough to withstand this onslaught. The hoof marks in the flower bed overlaid each other in a frenzied pattern and would have been impossible to count had I made the effort. I didn’t.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Then I turned and faced the garden.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  It wasn’t enough. I wanted to stomp my feet and throw things like a two-year-old. I wanted to yell at Joe. I wanted him standing in front of me so that I could scream and stomp and wave my arms around. How did the cows get out? Why didn’t you stop them? I wanted to spew vitriol at the cows, the stupid methane-gas producing animals.

  But the yard was empty. Joe and his father were not there. Glen was in school. There were no cows. Even the dog was missing in action.

  I wanted—no, I needed—to say something stronger than “shit.”

  But I don’t say things like that. The excrement word, yes. I spread it around quite liberally. I am a farmer’s wife. I know all about manure. It sneaks into my house on the bottoms of boots and attaches itself to the floorboards.

  When Lynne was two, she learned her first swear word. From me. I forget what I was doing. Whatever it was, it obviously wasn’t going well. Within minutes, she was imitating me. It came out “dit dit dit”, but the intonation was unmistakable.

  At the time I thanked God that she wasn’t saying, “duck duck duck”.

  It would be appropriate now, though. Ducks with their webbed feet are made for rainy weather. I wish there had been ducks in my garden instead of cows.

  The cows had fertilized the garden just as they had the lawn, but the worst damage came from the hoof prints. Some of the prints had water lying in them. Entire rows of corn, peas, and beans were obliterated; the fragile plants lay broken and tattered.

  My kids used to sing a song about a bovine that leads her people out of serfdom with the aid of metal hardware. The chorus dips down into sonorous bass undertones with hints of Wild West menace. It always made us laugh.

  Cows don’t need guns. They come with hooves and those are weapon enough. I didn’t see how my garden could survive those hooves and too much rain.

  There’s a story about a grain farmer in southern Manitoba who battled yearly with floods, droughts, infestations, and low prices. He bought a new combine and took it out in the fields for the first time. The ground was so wet and heavy that partway round the field, the combine broke in half. The farmer promptly went home and shot himself.

  Good story, but it’s not true. It’s a rural myth, like an urban myth but with a combine.

  We farmers seldom die with a big bang. Our end comes in bits and pieces, one season at a time. We live in next year country. Next year will be better. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

  The grocery bag had tipped over, spilling its contents over the car hood. A plastic tub of peanut butter had rolled off the hood and onto the ground. Without the weight of the bag to hold them down, envelopes had been picked up by the breeze and sent spiraling towards the house. I picked up one of them. It was our bank statement. Having talked to our bank manager just an hour before, I knew what the statement said. Unread, it still screamed of red ink. The deposit I had made that morning was only a Band-Aid; it could stem the flow for only so long.

  “Do you think we grow money trees on this farm?”

  My parents always said that whenever we asked for something. I said it to my own children. Money doesn’t grow on trees. That’s why we don’t have an HD TV or a trampoline in the backyard or a car with a CD player. It’s why we don’t go on winter vacations. It’s why your dad works 16-hour days and I have an off-farm job.

  I wanted to say the same thing to the bank manager. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Even if it did, trees don’t grow without sun and rain in proper proportions. Just like crops.

  But money is made from paper and paper is made from trees and trees grow in the soil. What fruit might this bank statement bear?

  I took the envelope and carried it back to the garden, grabbing a hoe as I went. I frenziedly dug into the sodden ground, using a pre-existing hoof print as a guide. I stuck the envelope in the hole, covered it with mud and used the back of the hoe to pack it down. Let’s see if money grows from that, I said to myself and laughed out loud. I felt triumphant and euphoric, like a magician hiding the rabbit that would later appear out of his hat.

  But as suddenly as it had come, the euphoria evaporated. This was our bank statement. How would I do a reconciliation if the statement was buried in the garden? I have always been meticulous, obsessive almost, about monthly bank reconciliations. And what if, someday, we were audited and we needed the cancelled cheques inside the envelope?

  I could see the auditor sitting in front of me. It would be a man. A male auditor might be heartless, but a female could be mean. Even in my imagination, I didn’t want to deal with a female auditor.

  “Where are the missing cheques?” he would ask.

  “I planted them,” I would say, with a smile and a glance towards the garden.

  “You what?”

  “They never grew,” I would sheepishly admit. “It was too wet.”

  The envelope was soggy and dirty, but had not been in the ground long enough to sustain any lasting damage. What the hell had I been thinking?

  I had had enough. I would run away and join the circus. Although I did not know what use the circus would have for a middle-aged woman with absolutely no gymnastic skills, a fear of heights, a distrust of wild animals, and no beard to draw the curious.

  I could man the admissions booth, I supposed. Or sell cotton candy. Or yell. Ladies and gentlemen, come and see the circus. I am good at yelling. If I had been here, instead of sitting as politely as possible in the bank manager’s office, I could have been yelling at the cows. It might have done more good.

  I gathered up the remainder of the mail and the jar of peanut butter, refilled the grocery bag, and then headed into the house.

  The telephone number was written on a magnet on the fridge door. Should I or shouldn’t I? What would I say?

  I dialed twice and hung up each time, then with a renewed resolve dialed once again, only to have to start over when I entered the number incorrectly. My hand tightened on the receiver as I finally heard the ringing tone.

  “Farm and Rural Stress Line,” a young-sounding female voice came through the wires and up against my ears.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Hello,” I said, then stopped.

  “Can I help you?” the voice asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “The cows got in my garden,” I said and burst into tears.

  I hadn’t realized I was crying now until I turned and saw Susan standing there with two cups of tea.

  ~ Susan ~

  I had never seen Joan cry before. I might have even said that she wasn’t capable of it. I did say it once to Glen and he defended his mother, admitting that she didn’t often cry but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. If he’d been here now, it would have been an “I told you so” moment.

  Setting the teacups down, I walked across the
room and put my arms around her. She relaxed against me and I felt both compassion for this woman who was experiencing something that could bring her to tears, and confusion because I had no idea what that something could be.

  It did not last long. Joan pulled herself away although her hands gripped my shoulders for a moment before she spoke.

  “You brought tea,” she said. “Thank you. I could use a break.”

  I brought the cups to the dining room table, pushing aside the pictures and decorations Joan had placed there when preparing to wash the walls. The cup I gave her was decorated with a crocus.

  “That looks familiar,” she said.

  “It should. It was yours.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. I remember now. I won it as a door prize at a community tea. Not sure I ever used it though.”

  “Guess not, or you would never have left it here. Thank you for that, because I use it almost every day.”

  “That’s right. You like crocuses, don’t you? I’m glad you got it then.”

  “Don’t push,” the nurse tells me now. “I know you want to. But you mustn’t. Not yet.”

  They wheel me into the delivery room and the doctor asks me to put my feet into the stirrups. My own doctor had talked about different positions; on my side, for example. Squatting like women in other cultures do. This guy is from the old school. I don’t care. I’d attempt a head stand if he promised that would do the trick.

  I push when the doctor tells me to and stop when he says. It seems to last forever. Carol told me this was the quickest part. She lied, too. Why does everyone lie?