Danny comes over with the baby to see what’s wrong. Susan tells him what I said, that I haven’t been a very good wife. Danny grins. He says, “That’s an understatement.” “That’s what I said,” says Susan, snorting with laughter. “Poor bunny,” I say. “I’m sorry.” He hands me the baby and helps us up. Tenderly, he pulls Susan’s coat together at the throat and tucks her scarf in.
She watches. She soaks things up through her eyes. She stares at Gabriela for hours on end, hungrily absorbing every whim and turn of emotion. As she gets closer to the end, everything but the child becomes superfluous. “I don’t want to forget her,” she says. (What she means by this is a mystery about which I cannot bear to question her.)
About an hour before Susan dies, she opens her eyes and says to me, “Well, here we go.” Her lungs begin to fill up, her breathing grows shallower. She makes a horrible bubbling sound in her chest, which I suppose is what they used to mean by the phrase “death rattle.” Her mother holds her head. I sit on the bed, clutching Susan’s hand.
Soon she is breathing air only into her throat. Then I think she must be dead, but her mouth keeps opening as though she were still breathing. It opens once or twice by reflex. I think this time she must really be dead. But then her chin moves once more and I feel a tremor in her hand. I say, “Go, baby sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m here. You can go and not be afraid because we’re here with you.” Finally, she is dead, though I am not certain when the borderline was crossed, only that she is on the other side. Her mother lets her down and starts, through her tears, to sing a lullaby.
Susan’s head is thrown back and slightly to the side, her mouth open. I recognize the pose. I’ve seen it in old paintings — it is the moment when the soul escapes through the mouth on its way to become a star. That’s an out-dated mythological reference, I know, a leftover, like the bison. But I haven’t got anything else. It just looks like that.
I go to see Ruth Hawking. (Her husband’s name is in the new phone book.) This is a little pilgrimage for Susan. But Ruth is gone. She left him with the kids and flew back to Saffron Walden. Her husband, a lonely, harried man, tells me, “She had a difficult time adjusting to life in Canada.” He invites me in, but has nothing more to add, and I leave after a few awkward minutes. (“Men!” I say to myself.)
3
I go to Medicine Hat for a visit. I like the area. All of a sudden, it strikes me that I really want a place of my own just outside of town where the dry chinook winds blow endlessly in the caragana and nothing stops the eye. I take Gabriela for a drive to look at real estate. (I get a list from a broker.)
Communication is now possible, up to a point. We stop at a roadside table to eat our picnic lunch. I take out a ball of yarn and begin to teach her the Cat’s Cradle. I don’t really know how to make a Cat’s Cradle myself, but I have brought a book and there is plenty of yarn. She is a reserved and intelligent child with Susan’s eyes. Watching my fingers fumble with the yarn, her face becomes a mask.
I say to her, “There are certain things you have to know. Suicide is not an option. Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants. Masturbation is healthy, the sooner started the better. It’s a sin not to take love where you find it. That is the only sin. I have photographs of your mother.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these stories have been previously published in the following magazines and anthologies.
“Story Carved in Stone” in Descant, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1988; The Journey Prize Anthology (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990). “Story Carved in Stone” won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Fiction.
“Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” in The Quarterly, No. 13, Spring 1990.
“Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes” in The Fiddlehead, No. 155, Spring 1988; The Journal of Literary Translation, Vol. 20, Spring 1988; 88 Best Canadian Stories (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1988); Best American Short Stories (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1989).
“The Canadian Travel Notes of Abbé Hugues Pommier, Painter, 1663-1680” in Fire Beneath The Cauldron (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1990).
“The Obituary Writer” in 87 Best Canadian Stories (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1987); Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 65, 1989.
“Turned into a Horse by Witches, Port Rowan, U. C., 1798” in This Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 2, May/June 1987; Open Windows: Canadian Short-short Stories (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988).
“A Guide to Animal Behaviour” in The Iowa Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring-Summer 1987; Open Windows: Canadian Short-short Stories (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1988).
“I, A Young Man Called Early to the Wars” in The Fiddlehead, No. 144, Summer 1985.
“The Travesty of Sleep” in Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 67/ 68, 1989; The Third Macmillan Anthology (Toronto: Macmillan, 1990).
“Woman Gored by Bison Lives” in The Third Macmillan Anthology (Toronto: Macmillan, 1990).
Guide to Animal Behaviour Page 17