“I thought you could help me rake the grass, Tessa. I pushed the mower around very early because I couldn’t sleep. Here is the basket I use to take clippings to the compost bin, which is there by the back fence.”
The raking took almost no time at all. After cleaning the bamboo tines of the last bits of sweet-smelling grass, Tessa wondered what she might do next.
“Would you mind going up on the stepladder to help train the new shoots of honeysuckle around the pergola? I feel a little too shaky to climb it these days, but I will hold it while you go up.”
Tessa didn’t mind at all. With Miss Oakden’s direction, she coaxed strands of honeysuckle in and around the lathe. The flowers were wonderfully scented, almost like cloves, the spice her mother put in apple pie. She had to avoid the bees with their heavy pollen sacs as they moved from blossom to blossom. And was delighted to find another of the small green frogs perched on a leaf like a tiny jewel. She was almost at eye level with it. Its throat pulsed, pale pink, and its tiny feet were splayed against the leaf like tiny hands, exactly the same brilliant green as the vine.
When they’d finished the chores, they had lemonade on the porch. Tessa wondered whether it would be all right to ask Miss Oakden questions about her daughter. There was a feeling in the house, Tessa couldn’t have articulated what exactly it was, but she felt the presence of a girl when she went in to help the woman carry out a tray. There was no other way to say it. The silence after a footfall. The slight movement of curtains as though someone standing at a window had moved away. Almost the sound after laughter dies away.
“Did your daughter go to my school, Miss Oakden?”
“For several years, yes, she did, Tessa. She had classes in the Annex. And then her grandfather asked that he be allowed to pay for her to attend St. Ann’s Academy—you know where that is, I believe, because one of the girls on your street is a student there?”
Tessa did know. Eva Den Boer, four doors down, went every morning on the bus in her tunic and knee socks, white shirt and tie. It took her outside the neighbourhood in more ways than one, and Tessa had never really known her very well at all, though they were the same age.
“Did your daughter have a grandmother too?” asked Tessa, thinking of her own, who lived in New Brunswick—the Victoria grandparents had died before she was even born—and who had come to spend a few weeks with her family after Tessa’s grandfather died.
“Well, yes, she did, although her grandmother only came around to the idea of knowing her when Grace was an older girl, no longer even a teenager, really. Families have odd ideas about things, my dear, and Grace’s grandmother was stubborn. But I believe she was glad to have changed her mind, even if it meant some regret for the years having passed without contact with Grace. As for my own parents, also her grandparents, they never knew Grace. My father died just after the Great War, the one in which Grace’s father was killed, and my mother never enjoyed good health, never contemplated a trip to Canada. In those years, I could not have afforded to take my daughter to England, which was where my mother lived. And when I could have managed a trip for us, it was too late. I tried to give Grace some sense of my family home there, my childhood. It was all I could do, though it seemed so little at the time.”
“Did she want to know about it?” Tessa asked, knowing how she pestered her mother constantly for stories of a childhood in New Brunswick, during which she would watch her mother for any little glimmer of the child she had been. It was a very strange business to try to imagine one’s parents as children, yet there were moments when those children could be found. In photographs sometimes. Or in the tone of a laugh, or at the beach when a mother might plunge into the waves like a girl, or a father helping to build a go-cart and then taking it from the top of the rise down the road, shouting with excitement like any kid.
“Yes, I think she did. I used maps so I could show her where we lived in relation to places like Stonehenge, for example, and Bath—she loved reading Jane Austen when she was a teenager. And I have some photographs of my family home, which was called Watermeadows. Grace liked the horses and the views of the river.”
“I’m making a map, Miss Oakden.”
“You are? What an interesting idea, Tessa. I see you in the cemetery fairly often, with your notebook, so am I correct in thinking that is part of your map?”
“Oh, yes. The entire neighbourhood. What I’m trying to do is make it all to scale with the important places and things on it. I’m using a legend. Did you know about the buried streams? Well, you do, because we talked about them a little, ages ago. But my dad found out where they come from, and I’m trying to get them right. People think they are storm drains, but they’re not. My dad told me that Indians used them as trails in the old days.”
Miss Oakden was taken aback for a moment. This child was full of surprises! She gathered her thoughts and then said, “Grace’s father knew about those streams, but they weren’t buried then. His father told me he used to ramble all over what is now this neighbourhood, but it used to be quite wild. There were marshes and swamps, the Chinese had their market gardens where Cook Street is now—the shops and the newer buildings towards Beacon Hill Park—and there were farms and orchards all around this area. And yes, many streams for a boy to explore. The Indian people used Ross Bay for bird hunting and they had camas digging areas all over. That was a root they collected and ate. Beautiful blue flowers, like the sky. The streams would have been like roads, I suspect.”
“There weren’t roads?” Tessa could not imagine the area without May Street, Fairfield Road, and even the narrow lanes in the cemetery.
“Oh, no, my dear. This would have been dense bush. Much of it was when I came here to live in 1914! Lots of the wild spirea and thimbleberry, ferns, the hawthorns with their shaggy bark and sweet blossoms. And the streams running, all of them, to Ross Bay or Foul Bay or Rock Bay, or over to the Inner Harbour. I think it wasn’t until much later that they were filled in or directed through culverts to the sea. For instance, in this area, no one would want to think of a cemetery with water running through it, I suppose.”
“That’s what my dad said too. Miss Oakden, there’s a loose board on your back fence. I discovered it when I was listening for the stream in Bushby Park. If you don’t mind, I can use it as a gateway when I come here. I can just fit through it. Shall I show you where?”
“No need to show me, Tessa. You may consider it your own private entrance to my garden.” And saying that, the woman had a faint and distant memory of a gap in a hedge, a small girl finding her way through it as her brother called her to come.
Later, working on her map, Tessa tried to draw in a boy in the upper waters of East Creek, at the very top of the map. She used her pencil as lightly as she could.
• • •
One day, after leaving Miss Oakden’s house—she had watered that day and had been given secateurs (“Though I think of them as pruning hooks, from Isaiah, another broken promise of the Lord’s.”) to take the finished roses off their canes: “Find a leaf node, my dear, here, just like this, and cut a little above it, at an angle. That will encourage the plant to flower again”— Tessa made her way to the beach to spend a little time looking out to sea. She found this compelling. Sometimes there were ships in the distance and always there were gulls to watch wheeling and turning in the heat. They’d glide low over the water and rise with a little silver fish, pursued by others as they flew to shore to eat. She was sitting on a warm log when she saw the skeleton wedged in behind the pile of logs nearest the breakwater. It was stretched out on its back, chest open, head turned to one side, arms by its side and short legs hanging down. She counted the fingers. Yes, there were five. It must be one of the bodies her father said had washed down from the cemetery in that storm his own father had told him about. It was too small to be an adult. It must be one of the children who died of the diseases before there was vaccine.
What should she do about it? It looked so peaceful there in its hid
den shelter behind the logs. A few strands of seaweed were caught on the skull.
She did nothing. She walked through the cemetery, thinking if she saw a caretaker, she would tell him. But what if he thought she was to blame somehow. Her brothers told ghost stories about people who dug up bodies and fished out their livers and suppose she was accused of having done this very thing? Her parents would be so angry. She couldn’t imagine the punishment if they believed she had done such a thing. Returning to the beach, she collected some large pieces of bark and arranged them over the skeleton like blankets.
For a week she told no one. She had trouble sleeping. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the skeleton. She dreamed one night that it called to her, saying it wanted its liver back, just like the story her brothers told in the dark. But there had been no insides when she found it, she knew that; just the perfect arch of its rib cage and the helpless hands hanging from the arms. She visited it in its hidden place, lifting aside some of the bark so she could make sure it was still there. In a moment of bravery, she reached down and touched the fingers. They were smooth and cool. She liked the feel of them in her own fingers. She touched the ribs. Once they had cradled a heart, two lungs, all the business of digesting. A child who had died before it had even gone to school—she was convinced of this because when she scrambled down into the hollow where it was and lay next to it in the sand, she was taller than it would have been when alive.
“Dad, I found a skeleton on the beach. I’m kind of worried about what to do about it. I think it might be one of the bodies that washed out to sea.”
Tessa’s father looked up, startled, from the magazine he was reading in a lawn chair in the backyard. A bottle of cold beer stood on an overturned bucket beside him. “A skeleton, Tessa? Are you sure? And what do you mean, the bodies that washed out to sea?”
“Don’t you remember telling me about a storm? Your dad told you about it? When the creeks flooded out part of the cemetery and some of the graves washed out to Ross Bay?”
She was anxiously wringing her hands. Her father saw dark hollows under his daughter’s eyes and wondered why he hadn’t noticed them before. He rose from his chair and found his sandals from where he’d let them drop from his feet in a moment of uncharacteristic summer abandon.
“Yes, but that was a long time ago, Tessa. 1909, I believe. You’d better show me this skeleton.”
They walked in silence down to the beach at Ross Bay just below the cemetery. Tessa removed the little cairn of bark she had placed over the skeleton. Her father looked at it briefly and then hugged her.
“Have you been worried about this for long, sweetie?”
She confessed that she’d found the skeleton a week earlier and hadn’t known what to do about it. She told him she’d looked for a caretaker but worried she might be accused of digging up a body.
“You did the right thing to tell me, but you needn’t have worried about this being something from the cemetery. Because, well, it’s a seal.”
“A seal, Dad? A seal?”
“I can see why you might have thought it was a human body. It’s a very good skeleton—all the parts are intact. See the long bones here that end in what look like hands? Those are the flippers, but there are even fingers, aren’t there? Think of the shape of the mammal sort of hidden in the outer trappings of a fish. And look how beautiful the rib cage is, like a boat. It’s a neat thing to have found, Tessa, and I’m quite relieved it’s not a human skeleton. I had visions of us calling the police and there being an investigation and . . . well, let’s just say I’m relieved.”
“I think we should bury it, Dad. I don’t want it to break up in the tide and that’s what would happen, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably. The sea takes care of all that very well, I think. Other animals feed on a dead one and the water and salt scour the bones. But yeah, we can bury it. The sand is a good final resting place for it, I suppose. You wait here and I’ll go home for a shovel.”
Tessa sat in the sunshine, beside the seal, waiting for her father to return. Now that she knew it was not a body from the cemetery, she felt free to touch it and to examine the way the joints were held together, to wiggle a tooth in the skull, to hold the strange hand in her own. When her father came down the stairs from the breakwater with the garden shovel, she had picked out a place as far from the low-tide mark as possible. She had laced two pieces of driftwood together with seaweed to make a cross, ready to plant when they had dug the hole, laid the skeleton in carefully, then covered it with fine dry sand.
“We should say something, Dad. What do they say at funerals? Are there proper words?”
Tessa’s father looked at her tenderly. “You have a good heart, Tess. Yes, there are proper words. I remember some of them from my father’s funeral. Let me think for a moment. Well, it’s probably not right to use something like this for a seal, but it does seem fitting:
Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved,
and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof rage and swell,
and though the mountains shake at the tempest of the same.
And there, we can say goodbye and go home for something cold to drink, as is usual after a funeral, Tessa.”
And so they did. Her father promised her he would say nothing about the skeleton to her brothers. She knew they would make fun of her, laughing about her conviction that she had found the remains of a child on the beach, and they would tell all the neighbourhood kids. She wanted it to be private, something between her father and herself.
PART THREE
Hecuba
TWENTY-FOUR
1962
Using a plant book of her father’s, Tessa drew the Atlas cedar onto her map, then the pines, with a little gathering of crows in the high branches. A cork elm in the southwestern corner. The stones themselves were more difficult. But she resolved this to some degree by taking a little notepad to the cemetery and sketching the stones from life (if it could be put that way). Then she carefully cut out around the drawings and pasted the images into their approximate locations on the map. Some of them were difficult to draw. The angel at Charles Edward Pooley’s grave, for instance. It was so elegant that she worked for a long time to get it as right as she could—which was not good enough. Several with doves were easier. And the Rithet mausoleum was fun. Mick, a good artist, taught her to use perspective; two lines coming to a point could show a road heading towards the horizon and angled lines could make a building appear less flat. So she drew the mausoleum’s arch and stonework, shading and erasing until it was as real as she could manage. She wished she could have indicated every grave, but there wouldn’t have been enough room on her paper so she selected the ones she felt closest to. Baby Campbell’s chair and booties. Mr. Spencer’s tall grey obelisk where she could hear the water and which also gave her the opportunity to sketch in part of the West Creek flowing underground, something she did by drawing wavy blue lines that, her legend explained, represented hidden water.
She worked for some time to make faint shadowy figures, those whose graves had washed away in the storm of 1909. Some of them she lightly sketched under the sea, as though swimming. And she paid attention to another grave Miss Oakden visited, with a woman’s name on it, and a long inscription:
I lay myself on these wounds
As though upon a true rock;
They shall be my resting place.
Upon them will I soar in faith
And therefore contented and happily sing.
She wrote the passage into her notebook, and wondered at it. It sounded like music, maybe a hymn that would be sung in church. Tessa hated church. Mostly her family didn’t go, but sometimes they had to and it was hard not to laugh when the old people sang in their shaky voices. This inscription was on a tall stone of the deep red granite, polished like glass, with little flecks of silver in it. Bluebells grew around it, the same colour as the sky. She supposed if you l
ived long enough, as many people you’d known all your life would be buried as not. And she knew what good company the dead could be. She sat and made a daisy wreath for her hair, right by the grave of Baby Green. But instead of putting it onto her head, she left it draped over the small footplate commemorating that baby who had no first name.
The cemetery was a cool place to while away summer afternoons when she was not needed by Miss Oakden or her mother was unable to walk with the children over to Gonzales beach. The grass, kept clipped and raked, was lovely to stretch out on, under a favourite tree—maybe the cork-bark elm down near where Memorial Crescent met Dallas Road. She could hear the sea just a few yards away. The crows were busy in the canopy, squabbling and muttering. Smaller birds nested in the hedging, and she watched them dart in and out with worms or insects to unseen young. She had taken to carrying a little notebook everywhere in order to record details that might be needed on her map. The nest sites, for example. The location of the perfect snakeskin she found shed on some rocks near the Helmcken mausoleum, its eye sockets intact. She had not wanted to touch it but sketched it so she could remember it exactly as it lay draped over the rocks like an empty ghost. And she sketched the seal skeleton too, from memory—its hands open to the sky.
On the evenings when there wasn’t Little League, most of the neighbourhood children gathered at Bushby Park for a game of scrub. Teams were chosen by the two captains, usually Mick and David Grey, a boy from Joseph Street; positions were assigned—Tessa was almost always a fielder. It was exciting at first to hover in the outfield with her glove, one Teddy had outgrown, and wait for someone to hit a ball in her direction. Once she surprised herself and everyone else by catching a fly. Mostly she chased balls like the other fielders, to the end of the park, across Bushby Street, into yards, fishing among flowers and shrubs while the runner loped around the bases and her own team groaned at her slowness. The one time she played shortstop, someone hit a line drive directly into her face. Her lip immediately swelled up to about four times its size; her mother was called and came running with ice. There was quite a lot of blood from both her nose and her mouth where her inner lip had been cut by her teeth, but luckily that was the extent of the damage. The swelling took five days to go down, and she kept to herself during that period, working on her map and resisting the call of the children in the park in the evening, their voices dreamlike in the falling light.
The Age of Water Lilies Page 19