After River

by Donna Milner

  My father refused to take regular baths like the rest of us. He swore that every time he bathed he got a cold, or pneumonia. He avoided the deep, claw-foot tub that took up half of our bathroom. Every night after the evening milking we heard splashing behind the locked door as he sponge bathed at the bathroom sink. Once a month he risked death and disease and took his ritual bath. And sure enough, the next day he was hacking and coughing and swearing he would never climb back into the tub.

  Dad said he didn’t need baths; his longjohns soaked up his sweat. He had three pairs, which he rotated throughout the week. Despite his refusal to bathe, I never thought my father smelled any different from the rest of us. We all carried that same barn aroma of cow manure, sour milk, and hay. The acrid-sweet smell was everywhere, in our clothes, in the house; it was as much a part of us as the milk that was our livelihood. When other children held their noses in the schoolyard it never occurred to me that those odours, so natural to our lives, were offensive to others. I didn’t realize the truth of their taunts until the first time I returned home after being away for two years. I can still remember how surprised I was when I walked in the door of our old farmhouse and inhaled memories.

  But I couldn’t help notice the odours on washday. Every Saturday morning my mother and I sorted the mountains of soiled clothes and linen on the floor of the enclosed front porch. Every week two pairs of father’s longjohns ended up in a pile with my brothers’ jockey shorts and T-shirts. My brothers refused to wear longjohns except in the worst of winter. Their underwear swished around with Dad’s in the wringer washer, a grey swirl of man-and-barn smelling soup.

  Mom once told me that it was interesting what you can tell about peoples’ lives from their laundry. She knew my brothers’ secrets from the state of their clothes and the contents of their pockets. Not that she ever used it against them. She adored her boys and was only surprised when she discovered some clue that betrayed they were human after all: the tobacco leaves stuck in the lining of their pockets, broken matches, snoose plugs and gopher tails. She read stains like a private diary.

  Morgan was fifteen on the washday an unwrapped condom fell to the floor as Mom turned his jean pockets inside out for the last load. She leaned over and picked up the translucent coil of rubber. She glanced over at me with raised eyebrows as if she wondered if I knew what it was. I was twelve, old enough to have heard jokes at school and to piece it together in my own fashion. Growing up on a farm made animal mating as natural as grass growing, but human mating, well, that was another thing entirely, and certainly never spoken about out loud in our home. Still, I lifted my lip in a disgusted sneer as if I knew exactly what the foreign object was for. As my mother pocketed the wayward rubber in her apron along with the buttons, coins and other orphans of washday she said, ‘Just wishful thinking, Natalie. That’s all this is. Just wishful thinking.’

  After all the laundry was pegged out on the clothes lines and flying in the wind, Mom opened the door at the bottom of the stairs in the kitchen. It was unusual for her to go upstairs except to change the sheets and we’d already done that. I waited a few minutes then followed her up. I slipped into my own bedroom. After she had gone back downstairs I peeked into my brothers’ room. There, in the middle of the fresh pillow on Morgan’s bed, was the condom.

  I never heard Mom say a word to him about her discovery. Morgan was quieter than usual at dinner that evening. He left the table before dessert and headed down to the barn even before Boyer.

  I’m sure Mom read my laundry as easily as she read my brothers’.

  She knew whenever I had been up in the hayloft in the summer. Our mother had a morbid fear of fire, and even though she agreed with Dad that her fears were unwarranted, she paid attention to her instincts. Everyone did. So in the hot days of August, after all the hay was in, and the loft was full, we were forbidden to play up there. It was one of her few rules.

  She knew it was me who had sneaked into the root cellar and polished off three jars of canned cherries when I was seven years old. She knew I almost drowned a piglet trying to make it swim in the water trough. And she knew when, at thirteen, I was about to start my monthly period. I paid no attention to the pink streaks in my cotton underpants. But she did. Before I knew I needed them, a large blue box and an elastic belt with metal tabs appeared on my bed one Saturday afternoon. When I realized what they were for, I thought she had read it in my tea leaves.

  My mother read tea leaves for her women friends when they visited. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when Dad and my brothers were off haying or cutting firewood, she would say, ‘Come on Nat, let’s have a tea party.’

  She would take out the good tea cups, her mother’s china, from the glass-fronted cabinet in the parlour. I only call it a parlour because she did; it was really just a long room off the kitchen that served as both dining room and living room. She’d set our tea cups and cookies at the corner of the huge oak table and we ‘girls’ had our stolen afternoon while the ‘men’ worked. After I finished my cup of milked-down tea, she would have me flip the cup upside down in the saucer and turn it three times. Then she’d read my future and my secrets in the leaves.

  Years later, when I had a daughter of my own, I realized it was really the laundry she read. The laundry gave away all our secrets.

  So, when I think of everything that happened after that summer day, I wonder, how could she not have known?

  Chapter Three

  October 2003

  MY MOTHER IS dying. She’s been threatening to die for the last five years. This time I think she means it. I hear it in Boyer’s words. ‘She’s asking for you, Natalie.’

  Still half asleep, I am unprepared for the quiet gentleness of my brother’s voice. I can’t remember the last time we spoke on the phone. It takes a moment to relate voice and message. An uncomfortable silence fills the line while I search for a reply.

  That’s how it is with Boyer and me. Our conversations are stilted, stop and go, static. They’ve been that way for years. On the rare occasions when we’re together, we constantly cut off each other’s sentences. It’s as if we fear any attempt to repair the damage; damage of wounds so old, scars so smooth, so healed over, that to pick at them would be like taking a knife to new flesh. So, whenever Boyer and I find ourselves together during my hit-and-run visits to Atwood, we fumble with safe words; we talk about the weather, the road conditions, my trip. Anything, except what stands between us.

  ‘I think you’d better come,’ he says now. It’s the first time my brother has given me advice, or asked anything of me in over thirty-four years. His words are enough – too much.

  ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ I say and we mumble our goodbyes. He doesn’t invite me to stay out at the farm. I don’t ask.

  After I hang up Vern rolls over and places his hand on my back.

  ‘It’s my mother,’ I say into the darkness. ‘I have to go to Atwood.’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’ Vern reaches up and turns on the lamp above the headboard. That’s my husband. No hesitation, no questions, just a direct route to fixing whatever needs fixing.

  I turn to him and attempt a smile. ‘No, that’s okay,’ I say, then throw back the covers. ‘I can take the bus.’

  The plane is not an option, and not only because of my irrational fear of flying. We live near the city of Prince George, in the centre of British Columbia. Atwood lies in the southernmost part of the province. There are no direct flights. With an overnight connection in Vancouver it takes two days to get there.

  Vern pulls himself up and sits back against the pillows as I get out of bed. I know what is coming. We have had this conversation before. Although Vern and I have been together for almost ten years he has never been to Atwood. Never met my mother. Or Boyer.

  ‘I want to go with you Natalie,’ he says, disappointment seeping into his words. ‘John or Ralph can take over the crew for a few days.’ Vern has a tree-planting business. Most of his planters have returned to university for the yea
r. We both know how hard it would be for him to take time off, yet I know he means it. ‘We can get there much quicker in the car,’ he adds.

  ‘No, really, it’s better if I go alone.’ I pull on my dressing gown. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay. And I don’t want to drive myself in case there’s snow in the mountain passes. I don’t mind the bus. It will give me time.’

  Time? Time for what? For Mom to die?

  With a sudden pang of guilt I wonder if I have deliberately waited too long. We each have our own secrets and regrets, Mom and I. Is it too late for the confessions and questions that I have yearned to voice?

  I pat Vern’s shoulder. ‘Go back to sleep,’ I tell him. ‘I’m going to go and check the Greyhound schedule.’ As I reach up and turn out the lamp Vern’s sigh is heavy with frustration but he does not argue.

  In complete darkness I make my way around the bed to the bedroom door. It’s an idiosyncrasy left over from childhood, feeling my way in the dark as if I were blind, counting the steps, and knowing exactly where each piece of furniture is. Lately when I catch myself doing it I wonder if I am preparing myself for old age. Does my body know something that I don’t? After fifty everything is suspect.

  Moonlight spills through the windows in my home-office. I sit down at the computer without switching on the lights. I’m frugal with electricity. Forced habits stay with you.

  The screen flicks on as soon as I touch the mouse. There was a time when the only meaning ‘mouse’ had for me was the wet grey lumps outside the kitchen door; gifts left on our porch by the barn cats. Now after years of making my living as a free-lance journalist, this plastic namesake moves like an extension of my body. Writing, once done in longhand then typed on my Remington manual, now flows from fingertips to luminous screen; even my mistakes show up neat and clean.

  The Greyhound schedule flashes up. The next bus is at six a.m. With transfers and waiting in stations the trip to Atwood takes fifteen hours. It seems all the roads of my life have led me further and further away from that remote West Kootenay town; as if distance alone is enough of an excuse not to visit, to stay away from my mother and brother. And now my daughter.

  I glance down at my watch. Eleven-ten. Too late to call Jenny? No, like her grandmother, my daughter is a night owl. She always has been. Her nocturnal wanderings are only one of the many inherited traits that by-passed me.

  She looks nothing like me, this daughter of mine. She is her grandmother’s child. The ash-streaked hair, the high, wide cheekbones, the robin-blue eyes, the small bump on the nose, and the flawless skin that soaks up the sun so greedily, all have skipped a generation. At least with the women. Boyer inherited those same features, only with an increased intensity and stronger angles. The eyes, the profile, the smile, all the same handsomeness that was–still is – so uniquely my mother.

  Over the years I have heard many people call her pretty, but that was far too dismissive a word for my mother’s classic beauty. My daughter now wears that same beauty with grace, along with her grandmother’s intoxicating smile, a birthright shared with her Uncle Boyer.

  Even now, anyone meeting these three would know that they are family. Mom and Boyer have often been mistaken for brother and sister. And my daughter Jenny looks as if she could be the child of either of them.

  I inherited my father’s brown eyes and hair, his milk white skin and blunt features. I look like what I have become, an outsider, a stranger.

  I was named after my mother. Although everyone calls her Nettie, Mom’s given name is Natalie Rose. Our first name is where the similarities end. I might have suspected I was adopted if I had not heard the story from Dad – so many times that I thought I remembered being there – of how, while he was delivering milk on the day of my birth, my mother walked the three miles into town and up the hill to the hospital.

  I was born on August 12, 1951. On the exact same day my grandmother, Amanda Margaret Ward, was born sixty-two years before. She had been the first baby delivered in St Helena’s, the brick and stone hospital whose windows overlook the main street of Atwood. Her great-grandchild would be the last. No one remembers this bit of trivia now except me and maybe, in her more lucid moments, my mother.

  Tonight she lies in that same hospital, perhaps in the same room where I was born, and calls my name.

  Chapter Four

  Nettie

  SHE HEARS THE baby crying.

  The insistent mewing of a newborn drifts through the darkness and calls her from her unquiet sleep.

  No, wait. That can’t be right. The baby was stillborn. But he’s crying. How can that be? The child is dead. He has gone to heaven. No. To purgatory.

  Now she knows where she is. With him. In limbo. Forever. She has condemned the unbaptized child to spend eternity in this nothingness. She deserves to be here, but he doesn’t. She must tell someone. Tell someone he’s crying.

  ‘Hush, Nettie,’ a soft voice whispers, ‘there are no babies on this ward any more.’

  She feels a warm hand on her forehead, pushing back the strands of hair. For a moment she thinks it’s Gus. Should she tell him?

  She swims up, against the current of drugs flowing through her veins. She surfaces to meet familiar eyes looking down at her. Kind, caring, eyes. They belong to Barbara Mann, the granddaughter of an old friend. Now she knows where she is. She’s in the hospital. In the extended care unit on the third floor.

  Barbara is the night nurse. Nettie used to change her diapers.

  The voice, the touch, pulls Nettie back, but the drugs are stronger.

  She fights to stay for a moment longer. She tries to clasp hold of the nurse’s arm. She needs to tell her, to tell someone.

  ‘It’s all right Nettie,’ Barbara croons. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  And Nettie calls from a long spiralling tunnel, ‘Natalie …’

  But it’s the nurse’s voice that answers, a singsong lilt, ‘Hush, dear, shhhh … It’s okay, Nettie. Just let go now.’

  And Nettie calls back, ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ But it’s too late. She slips through an invisible trap door.

  Somewhere the baby cries again, but now Nettie is standing in her kitchen at the farm.

  This is real, she thinks, the rest was a dream.

  Everything is so clear. She studies the green-speckled linoleum tabletop. Her fingers trace the familiar rings left by a thousand coffee mugs. This table, built by Gus’s father, is large enough to seat a dozen people. It’s solid, real, and as old as the farmhouse. Everything of importance to her family, to the farm, has been discussed and planned at this table. All the preparations of life. All the chopping, dicing, canning, and pickling; all the plucking, gutting, kneading, and baking was done here.

  She surveys the array of vegetables spread out on the tabletop. The aroma of rich, loamy soil still clings to the potatoes, carrots and beets. She must hurry to prepare them. There are mountains of meat to be chopped and ground, chickens to be plucked. She will never finish before everyone arrives.

  Natalie’s footsteps sound behind her. Her daughter is leaving. Nettie wants to turn and tell her not to go, but there’s too much to be done. Her hands are busy. Chop, chop, chop. A pile of cubed meat rises in front of her. She hears the creak of the screen door. She grabs a handful of wet meat and tosses it into the grinder clamped to the end of the table.

  The kitchen door slams; still she does not turn. She wants to call out, but she needs to get this done. Footsteps sound, unhurried, hesitant, on the porch stairs. Nettie counts each footfall, each step. On the fourth tread, her daughter stops and waits – waits to be called back. Nettie opens her mouth but no sound comes. She wants to call out. She wants to tell Natalie she heard the baby cry, but she cannot form the words. Too late. The last footstep echoes and disappears.

  The tabletop swirls before her. She dives into the green linoleum sea. It swallows her up and she drowns in the darkness, the nothingness.

  Chapter Five

  IN THE GLOW from the computer s
creen, I press the first speed dial on my phone. Jenny’s home number.

  ‘Hello?’ Nick’s voice answers after one ring. Only a man will pick up the phone on the first ring. I haven’t met a woman yet who won’t wait until at least the second ring before answering. Is it because we can’t shake the old notion of being thought too anxious, too available?

  ‘Hello, Nick. I hope it’s not too late to call.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he assures me, then asks, ‘How are you, Mom?’

  Mom, how easily he has taken to calling me that. We chat for a few moments with the small talk that is expected. Nick Mumford, my son-in-law of three years is much more at ease with me than I have ever been with him. But time has eroded my resistance – a resistance I felt before I even met him. Nick, whose grandfather was our family doctor when I was growing up, is one of life’s little twists that show up with an ironic sense of inevitability. Just like the fact that Jenny chose to do her medical internship at St Helena’s Hospital in Atwood. The moment she told me she was dating old Dr Allen Mumford’s grandson, I knew she would end up with him. And I knew she would end up staying in the town I have spent most of my adult life avoiding.

  ‘Here’s Jenny.’

  ‘Hi, Mom. How are you doing?’ At the sound of my daughter’s voice I am overwhelmed with how much I miss her. ‘I’m fine. I just talked to Boyer.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I saw him at the hospital earlier. I asked him to call you.’

  I’m not surprised. Jenny is like a typical child of divorced parents; always trying to mend broken relationships. When it comes to her uncle and me, she uses every excuse to force us to talk to each other.