Given

by Susan Musgrave

  The sun was coming up, hard. I went back inside. Vernal said he was afraid the peacocks were becoming drug addicts — he’d seen them nibbling on the opium poppies that grew wild all over the property, and then stumbling around with heroin-honeymoon eyes. He was considering putting them on a methadone program for the winter because the cry of a peacock going through withdrawal would probably wake the dead. “Worse than their mating call, if you can imagine,” he said.

  I slid the door closed behind me. “Do you still take both in your coffee?” he asked.

  “Black, please.” I’d never taken it any other way, but why should Vernal remember now, when he hadn’t ever remembered during our marriage?

  “If it isn’t too much trouble,” I added, staring at my distorted face in the stainless steel vastness of Vernal’s prototype toaster. I was beginning to feel like a house guest, all these pleasantries.

  Vernal, I noticed, still kept his newspapers stacked neatly on the kitchen table: another habit that hadn’t changed. When we’d lived together he would sit and drink his first two cups of coffee and read me anything he thought I ought to know.

  Vernal said he was the only person on the island who actually read newspapers; most people used them to light their fires. He took the lid off the sugar bowl and waved it in front of my face. “Hmmmm, empty already. I filled it just last night.” I didn’t respond, as I went through a month’s worth of papers Vernal had saved. I had imagined my story would have made headlines since the day I walked away from the prison van and boarded a plane. Newspapers have a way of sensationalizing prison escapes: “Killer Mom Flees Custody.” “Authorities Say Escaped Murderer Back in Canada.” “Canada Mum on Extradition Where Death Penalty Involved.” “Armed and Female: No Child Safe While Killer Mom at Large.” But nowhere did I find the smallest mention of my prison break. Instead I found myself confronted by a photograph of my seatmate from LAX, who’d been arrested and charged with conspiracy to import three tonnes of cocaine into the country. I looked up to show Vernal.

  “Small world, isn’t it?” he said. “He retained me as counsel a couple of days ago. They don’t have much of a case against him. All circumstantial evidence except for what he had strapped to his body — for his personal use, of course.

  “That’s not all you missed out on,” Vernal said. He went into his study and brought me the one paper he said he wasn’t going to burn. I stared at the headline. “Terrorist Attacks Claim Thousands.” While I had slept six commercial airliners had exploded in mid-air, within twenty minutes of one another, over “the targeted attractions” of Hollywood, Las Vegas, Disneyland, the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower, and the Pyramids of Giza.

  “Unreal,” Vernal said, as he spread a tortilla with ketchup then topped it off with a dollop of mayonnaise and folded it in half. For a moment I thought he meant the tortilla sandwich. “For the first time since I’ve been coming to the island, I wish I had a television.”

  I sat contemplating the headline, trying to picture the claimed souls. Wherever there is death we speak of it “claiming” us, a reminder that the Grim Reaper, from the beginning of our lives, has a stake in our destiny.

  “There was a suicide bomber on board each of those flights. Each one supposedly had a grenade in her vagina,” Vernal said. “A group called the Army of Roses has claimed responsibility. It’s an extremist faction that encourages women to commit Jihad Fardi, or “personal initiative attacks.”

  He bit into his tortilla and got mayonnaise on his moustache. “This kind of experience isn’t encoded in our collective genetic makeup,” he said, wiping the mayonnaise away. “What could have prepared us for something like this?”

  Our care and treatment counsellor used to tell us stories, giving us, in each of them, an exemplum, a little sermon that preaches by example. In a good story the experience is primary, not the message, and the message — whatever it was she believed she was trying to communicate — was usually lost on us. One of her favourite cautionary tales was about what happened to a frog if you dropped it in a pan of room temperature water and heated the water to a boil. The frog floated half-awake, like she was taking a lovely bath — nothing in her experience led her to believe she was in danger — her eyes slowly sliding shut. If, however, you plunged the frog into a pot of boiling water, she would try to jump out. Instinctively she knew that the hot water meant death.

  Rainy and Frenchy and I figured that either way the frog was toast. I wondered if, back at the Facility, she was repeating the frog sermon now, comparing what happened to the cooked frog to what happened to those doomed souls inside the jet planes.

  I set the newspapers aside. My serendipitous escape had been pre-empted by America declaring war on terror.

  PART THREE

  Dead children do not give us memories, they give us

  dreams.

  — Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking

  I HAD BEEN AT THE FARM A little over a month, when Vernal said he thought a change of scenery would do me good. He made waffles, spread them with peanut butter and set my plate down on the paper I was reading, obscuring the thoughtfully pious faces of four of the women martyrs, shahidas in the Army of Roses, not one of whom had lived to blow out the candles on her thirtieth birthday cake. In a perverse way I knew I should be grateful to the terrorists. They had taken the heat off me.

  The photographs of the looters at the crash sites made me think of the last riot at the Facility that had been caused by peanut butter — those individual portions that come sealed in matchbox-size containers. It is hard now to explain the relevance of what occured, from a bigger-picture perspective, but in prison an unalterable daily routine was what spared many of us from going insane. To wake up and go to the chow hall only to find the single-serving packs of peanut butter, jams and jellies were smaller than the ones we were accustomed to — it was an undermining of morale. If you couldn’t count on a small thing like a portion of peanut butter staying the same, what could you count on? That same day the girls started ripping their toilets out of their walls causing massive flooding. The riot squad moved in and soon we were all on our knees, retching and blinded.

  I didn’t want to upset Vernal any more than I did simply by living under the same roof — a reminder of how hard he’d tried, how much he’d failed — but I couldn’t eat the waffles. The peanut butter made me smell tear gas and want to throw up.

  Vernal said I looked unusually pale and suggested we take our coffee outside to the pergola the former owner had built as a place for meditation on the edge of a berm. In a moment of tender loveliness, I saw a blue heron standing among the lily pads; he took flight as we approached, his slender lines a haiku inside feathers.

  “That’s the villain who eats my goldfish,” Vernal said, and the moment died.

  We sat together, not speaking, looking up at different parts of the sky, as if seeking direction. I thought of something Frenchy had said, wisely, in group one day. “It never be a good mistake — be alone wid someone you shouldn’t have loved.”

  I can’t say I shouldn’t have loved Vernal to begin with — who ever gets love right the first time? — but we both held onto grief because it was all we had left of our love. I was afraid, if I let my grief go, there would be nothing left of us.

  The sun, as if newly out of bandages, shone weakly from behind bouldery clouds. I felt, in the tearing of the wind, the trees waiting for winter to strip them. Vernal said he’d tried meditating in his spare time, but hadn’t been able to sit still long enough. “I’m hoping they’ll invent a drug to help me meditate,” he said, half seriously, as he felt around inside his jean jacket and pulled out a baggy full of bud, and rolled a joint.

  He lit it, inhaled, and smoked half of it before offering it to me. “Toke?” he said, through his teeth, so the smoke couldn’t escape.

  I shook my head. “I thought you’d stopped.” I looked away, up into the sky, an aching blue over my head.

  “I have. This is just . . . it’s medicinal. Helps me
relax. Helps me . . . appreciate the natural world better.”

  Vernal nudged me and pointed back across the creek towards the meadow. “Some people spend their whole lives looking for their own personal space. All you have to do is die and you get more space than you know what to do with.” Vernal often began to speak enigmatically when he got high, another habit that I had found irritating when we’d lived together.

  But I caught myself worrying about him again, thinking back to the hopeless days of our early marriage when I used to take his cigarettes out into the garden and break them, one by one, as if this simple act of caring would be enough to help him break a lifelong habit.

  The sign at the Christian vegetable stand now made the Lord sound like an abusive father who comes home from a bad day at work and starts taking it out on his kids: “Don’t Make Me Come Down There”. A headless rabbit lay stretched out across the top of the sign warning against trespassing, loitering, or soliciting. “He shoots cats, dogs, anything that moves, the son of a bitch,” said Vernal. “He’s one of those Right to Silencers — but he thinks it means he has the right to use a silencer on his gun.”

  We did a wash at the King Koin Launderette and shopped for the new clothes I needed at Natural Lee’s — a rain jacket that fit properly, jeans, work socks, three T-shirts, and two left-footed gumboots. I asked about the likelihood of buying a matching pair in the future. “It’s what we get,” the clerk said.

  We had one minor skirmish in the grocery store: Vernal insisted we needed a bag of sugar and more Fruit Loops. He accused me of being a cereal thief, of sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to feed my addiction. I protested — I’d never had a sweet tooth — but none of my protestations were going to change Vernal’s mind.

  He had one item left on our list — a woven willow coffin. I said I would price one while he went to a noon hour meeting.

  At first I thought the door to Down to Earth was locked but it turned out to be, like my dresser drawers at home, merely swollen. There appeared to be no one behind the counter in the dark, serious shop smelling strongly of incense.

  I stood, looking over the stock: the pottery coffin; the one made of papier-mâché; waterproof, biodegradable, soundproof, earthquake-proof coffins in all shapes — tapered, rectangular, or teardrop. The saddest of all were the coffins stacked to one side, pint-sized and painted a bare white, as if white was the most innocuous, the colour least likely to excite strong emotions.

  “I can help you.” A statement, not a question. A man, wearing an ill-fitting suit, a black shirt and an incongruous tie with dollar signs and dice all over it, stood beside me — I hadn’t even heard him creep up on me. I glanced at his eyes, the green of freshly squeezed limes. I told him I was thinking of buying a Chrysalis.

  “That will be for yourself.” His voice sounded hoarse, broken and interrupted as though being transmitted on faulty wires.

  “No. Yes. I mean, for storage.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” the man sighed. “No one ever comes in here saying they want a coffin because they are going to die. We might die at any moment, yet we all live as if we plan to be here forever. My job, you get good at reading futures.”

  “It would be a useful thing to know,” I said.

  He went on, undeterred. “This is your lucky day, those bad babies just went on sale.” He must have felt the subtle change that passed through my body at the word “babies”. “You catch insensitivity, working here,” he said, backpedalling. “Someone kicks the bucket, it’s just another day. Business as usual, if you see what I mean.”

  I did. What I’d learned in my moments of deepest grief was that the world, which had turned into a nightmare for me, was the same ordinary world for everyone else. I had also learned this: the grieving don’t forget their grief simply for someone else’s sake.

  He pointed to where the woven willow coffins were stacked, neon-red price tags hanging from their handles, giving them a cheap, discounted look. “Two for one sale,” he said; his eyes had become cloudy, like beach glass, as though a fog were trapped inside. “One size fits all.” I couldn’t look at him straight because I felt as if I might step into his eyes and become lost in the fog that was wisping its way into my head.

  “People come in here all the time. They say, ‘Life is passing me by.’ I tell them, ‘You don’t want to make the same mistake with death’. Did you want these bad babies . . . my bad . . . you want those units delivered or will you be picking them up in the hearse?”

  I remembered Vernal saying everyone here knew everybody else’s business. I said I’d stop by for the coffins later, grabbed my parcels and left.

  Ceese & Son had reopened for business — a sign in the window read, “Grand Opening Free Coffee Balloons for the Kids” as if it were a factory outlet selling unpainted furniture. I crossed the road to the Snipe hoping to see Hooker Moon’s red truck pulling up outside, but when that didn’t happen I wandered over to the cemetery, a stony shrubbery of gravestones that sloped towards the sea, behind the Church of the Holy Brew. I had to ask myself why I had let Hooker — a man I’d never met and only seen once — fill so many of my waking, and dreaming, hours. He’s the one they wrote the song about, “Bad Moon Rising”.

  The graveyard was undergoing a facelift. During the winter high tides, a sign informed, parts of the graveyard were awash, and the dead were being evacuated and moved to higher ground: “Your Tax Dollars at Work: Another Project for a Growing BC”. I acquainted myself with some of the town’s permanent residents. In the pioneer quarter I found the Shakespeare clan (including a William who had died at birth), the extended Ceese family, and a plot of Bend’s. A tusked bronze boar, “Erected by His Wife” squatted impudently in the centre of Orbit Bend’s grave: visitors, perhaps hoping to increase their sexual prowess, had rubbed shiny the tusked boar’s testicles. I was tempted to reach out and rub them myself, they looked that trusting.

  The world had changed in many ways since I’d gone to prison, but one thing that hadn’t changed was graveyards. They were still sombre places and, like Vernal said, full of sober men and women. A granite slab with your name, birth-hyphen-death date, and someone else’s idea — “Rest in Peace” — of how you should spend eternity.

  I strolled on beneath the dark conifers, then stopped before a grave decorated with crushed beer cans that had been arranged into the shape of a cross. Someone, a girlfriend perhaps, had placed Mickey and Minnie Mouse figurines in amongst the cans, a strand of dried seaweed binding them together at the neck.

  I was contemplating the tides, the graves in danger of washing out to sea, when I came upon the most woeful part of the graveyard. There were few trees here whose root systems might disturb the restless sleep of those who died before they were old enough to know the meaning of the word grief.

  I walked without purpose, then sat in the shadows between a grave containing the ashes of Mary Joseph’s five children who had been “lost in a fire”, and the memorial to Crystil Sam’s three sons, drowned at sea. Other women had lost far more than I had lost — though I remembered a slogan from the one NA meeting I’d attended in jail: “a teaspoon of pain, a cup of pain, it’s all the same”. Losing three children or more equalled, to me, a cup of pain. Losing one child, in comparison, a teaspoonful. But that teaspoon could be as full or as empty as the world.

  There’s this to think about: if I hadn’t had Angel, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over. What if We Never Wanted Anything Enough to Hurt Over? I’d written this in big letters — to remind myself in case I ever started to forget — and stuck it on the wall in front of the table in my cell where I used to sit everyday to write letters. Rainy asked me what the words said and when I told her she asked if she could use those words for her twins, who shared the same grave, an unmarked one. Her excuse was she had never been able to think of anything important enough to have carved in stone and even if she could have thought of something, she wouldn’t have been a
ble to afford it.

  I told her to quit her snivelling, she wasn’t the first poor person on earth to bury her kids. That sounds cruel, the way I talk about it now, but I had just got to the part in Beloved where Seth selects a gravestone for her baby. She wants her baby’s name chiselled on it; the engraver says “you give me ten minutes, I’ll do it for free.”

  All she gets for ten minutes is “Beloved”. If she could have stood it for longer, up against the dawn-coloured stones sprinkled with chips of stars, the engraver’s young son looking on; if she could have given him ten minutes more she would have earned the two words she so desperately desired for her child, “Dearly Beloved”.

  Rainy thought “Dearly Beloved” sounded lame, and not how she felt. She liked “What if We Never Wanted Anything Enough to Hurt Over?” She just hoped she had enough cash so she wouldn’t have to double up on the engraver and his crew to pay for that many words. She said this the night before she was executed.

  The most heartbreaking tomb, the one that Vernal found me kneeling beside, was built like a granite bunk bed, with an angel-baby surrounded by carved animals who looked as if they had turned to stone the moment his eyelids closed for the last time. A stuffed teddy bear held a handful of red and yellow balloons that hung limply puckered from their strings. I tried to remember, as I knelt in the sweet, uncut grass at the edge of the bed — the stone sheets had been tucked in so tight there would have been no escape from that final sleep — how capable of emotion I, too, had been once.

  I’ve heard that, when a limb dies and is amputated, a person can still feel pain in the body part they’ve lost. When you lose your child that phantom limb is the whole world trying to reach out and wrap you in its grief. You do not want to outlive your children. This is the only thing I am sure of, the one thing I know.