Pulling myself up from the lumpy cushions, I leaned towards her. “And do you think a child begotten is a mother’s to keep?” I asked, unable to keep the crossness out of my voice. “Shouldn’t all of one’s offspring be encouraged to go off and make lives of their own?”
“Well sir, I thought she was sound asleep,” said Suze in that hushed whisper that carries loudly at night. “Sure you can’t all fly away from home, silly. Somebody’s got to stay back and care for the old, hey, Addie maid.”
Mother opened her mouth to speak, but lapsed into silence as I held on to her stare with the same round-eyed boldness as when I’d been a girl challenging her over a sum at the kitchen table. “Goodness, she still got that brazen look,” said Mother, and broke into an affectionate grin. “See how lucky you are,” she added, gesturing towards Suze, “she’d have you anchored home from your travels, caring for your contrary old mother.”
“That I would, and you knows I would,” said Suze, “and besides all that, what’s the sense of having a family and getting attached anyway if you all goes off someday? Might as well put us old out with the horses, we got no young left to fill our time with. What do you say, Addie?”
Mother’s smile of agreement waned before my accusing stare. “What is it, what’re you thinking now?” she asked, fighting for clarity through the dimness of the room, keen for the thought behind my words. Then, equally eager to leave them, she looked at Suze again. “I think we got her frightened—she’ll be stuck home someday, making soup and hot toddies for the old.”
“Don’t know how lucky they are,” said Suze. “That’s what I’m always saying to Ben, he can go off and not worry about a thing. And when something goes wrong he always got a place to come back to. Because for sure things don’t always go right out there, always times you got to come home.”
“Isn’t that something we do naturally, come home to care for our sick?”I asked impatiently. “You’re making it sound like an apprenticeship—something we readies ourselves for at our father’s table.”
“That such a bad thing, learning from your father’s table?” asked Mother.
“Suppose not, but suppose none of us ever left—how would we ever create new ways if we’re held back in the old?”
Mother balked. “And what do you think happens to us who never leaves home, Sylvie—you think we grows stagnant like bog water? Sir, the things she says.”
“I didn’t meant it like that—”
“Praise the lord, I hope not, for there’s not a minute in a day when the water’s not changing its colour or the wind don’t touch me differently. You don’t have to go off to find newness, if that’s what you’re saying. Newness grows out of every day—no matter where you’re standing, for them with eyes to see it.”
“I’m not haughty enough to think you bog water, Mother. I’m saying we need to feed off others, not just our fathers. And to do that, we gotta venture off the stoop sometimes.”
“Oops, there they goes, popping off like firecrackers agin,” said Suze, looking from me to Mother with a knowing look. “You’re both haughty if you ask me, hardly ever comes for a visit, neither of you. Especially you, Sylvie—don’t think you’ve ever stepped a foot inside my door. And all your mother’s saying is that not all things can be learned from books, that’s all she’s saying, and I agrees with that.”
“And all I’m saying is, I was taught at a very early age to think deep and to think further than the world I was born into,” I said steadily. “Do you renege on that, teacher-mother? Or was it something you wanted just for me?”
The words kind of slipped out, and I held myself taut before Mother’s look of discomfort, then sudden anger.
“You wanted to,” she said deeply. “You always talked of leaving, and yes I encouraged you, for god help the youngster whose mother lacks the passion of dreams. And good that you did leave—for you learned how to think and how to work, and that’s all the learning you needs right there. But we don’t all have to leave home to learn that, so you don’t have to worry about Chris. He’s learning that right here with his father.”
“Chris?”
“Yes, Chris, that’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it—well, I am then,” she replied to my baffled look, “and all those letters you write him about some art school in Nova Scotia. What’s that all about, if you’re not trying to lure him from home?”
“Lure him. My gawd, Mom, you makes me sound like some kind of predator.”
“I just don’t know why you’re always at him, is all.”
“I’m not always at him, I just write letters is all, they’re about everything, about me and what I’m doing. Gawd, do you read his mail?”I said with a guilty flush. “Anyway, what if I do encourage him towards university? He’s got such a great talent, wouldn’t you like to see him developing it?”
“He is, he is developing his talent, he’s always at his drawing. Paper a house with the stack of drawings under his bed. And for all that, he likes getting away from it, too. He likes being with his father.” A cajoling tone entered Mother’s voice, then hardened at my look of impatience. “Fine then, it’s not just for his father I’d like to keep him home, but for me, too. I’m never comfortable with how he keeps going off—like he’s having a spell. I don’t trust him working far from home, amongst them who don’t know his ways.”
“His ways? What’re you talking about, his ways?”
“The way he keeps going off, you knows what I’m talking about.”
“Jeezes, Mother, you still think there’s something wrong with Chris—”
“I do then.”
“Ohh, for gawd’s sakes—”
“My, they’re right back at it!”exclaimed Suze. “I’ll cover up my head if ye keeps it up—swear to gawd, I’ll cover up my head.” She held up her blanket threateningly.
Mother drew back into her chair, her mouth tightly pursed. I remained tense, looking from her to Suze, then back to Mother as Suze asked, “Why, what’s Chris at these days—he’s got you worrying agin, don’t he.”
“No. No, nothing different, just the same old thing, really. The way he goes off sometimes, wouldn’t hear a train bearing down on him. And he could very well have some sort of epilepsy,” she said with emphasis to my disbelieving look. “I took him to doctors, they found nothing, and—ohh, I don’t pay that much attention to it anymore, it’s not a thing that threatens him—I watches him come to himself when the kettle starts whistling, or if he’s out walking in water and his feet starts getting wet. But I don’t think he should be working at just anything either. It’s good he’s with his father, someone watching over him.”
“Mother, Chris don’t have epilepsy. He’s just going off in daydreams, is all.” I tossed aside my blanket impatiently. “Gawd, I can’t believe you still think that. He just needs something to keep his attention, is all—something challenging and disciplined. Perhaps then he’ll pay more attention to what’s going on around him, not to mention taking his talents further than doodling at the kitchen table. How’s he going to find his own way if he’s not nudged out of the nest?”
“Oh, and that’s what you’re planning on doing, is it— nudging him out of the nest?” Mother sat forward, a cross look on her face. “Why, who are you to point his way?”
“Who am I? I’m his sister, I sit at the same table as he, remember? Or do you forget that I, too, lived?”
The words were out, the look of surprise registering on my face the same as on Mother’s. I quickly opened my mouth to say something else, to cover the awful thing I’d just said, but nothing came to me. I had laid open my wound and now shivered from the rush of cold air encircling the exposed flesh.
The quiet of the room was jarred by the sound of voices in the corridor. A man’s voice, a woman’s, speaking lowly, carefully, and then the muffled cry of an outraged child. A door closed, the child’s cry muffled, then silence again.
Mother’s face saddened. She looked at me imploringly, sinking back into th
e cavernous shadow of the chair. I fidgeted with the flannel sheet, feeling its roughness against my cheek. Rather the proud-standing teacher-mother tolerating no interruption to her words than this tiny-shouldered woman being swallowed by the thick, rounded arms of her chair and looking at me with such guardedness.
Suze pumped herself forward, looking curiously to me, a protective hand touching Mother’s arm. “My, the strange way she got of putting things,” she said to Mother. “And what’s you even talking about, we started off with the old, taking care of the old, and mercy knows where you’ve carried it. Sure, it’s not something I ever thinks about, who’s giving what to who. We all looks after the other—that’s only right, isn’t it—especially with the old. Sure, they took care of us. And besides that, they might end up taking care of us agin, yet. We don’t know the future, do we?”
Mother was pleating and unpleating the tail of her skirt, her eyes cast down. She brushed at the fabric, making away with the pleats. She looked at me, my rounded eyes slowly withdrawing from hers.
“The future,” she said with a scornful laugh. “Hard thing to see, isn’t it, the future? Cripes, I hardly know my past. Gran always says it’s in later years we start looking back and seeing the rights and wrongs of ourselves.” She grimaced. “I keeps looking back, but nothing’s come to me yet that’s making me any smarter.”
I felt sickened by the ill look on her face. I forced a smile and struggled for some thought of agreement between us. “No doubt most prayers are changed by hindsight,” I said lowly. “Still, we keep making them, eh?”
Suze looked from me to Mother, unsure of whether twas a laugh or a lecture we were both needing. Her eyes on Mother, she gave a deep chuckle. “I laughs at what you just said, Addie, about looking backwards. I can hear Ben now, every time I harps about his forgetting everything I done for him while he was growing up—he turns and says, ‘How far ahead can you walk, Mother, with your head turned backwards?’ Silly fool, I always tells him, you thinks with your heart, silly fool, not your eyes.”
Both Mother and I smiled, grateful for the relief Suze’s words brought us, grateful for her laughter, her distracting us from ourselves, from each other. For neither of us could probe that other thing my outburst had let into the room, the wound that was once solely Mother’s but through the years had migrated from her maternal walls into me and was shared now between us.
Mother looked at Suze, her smile tinged with a sadness. “I don’t know about that,” she said, “thinking through the heart. That’s when I gets muddled, when I think through the heart. It becomes more of a feeling than a thinking thing, and I’ve always been one to sink with feeling. And Chris, too …” She trailed off, looking towards me, her pursed mouth showing her tiredness from the past few days. “But I’ve never worried about you, my girl,” she said sadly, as though speaking a truth she’d just now discovered within herself. “You’ve been thinking with your head since the day you were born, you’ve been. Never worried about you taking the wrong step.
“Anyway, time for sleep,” she said with resolution. “We’ll be talking all night if we let ourselves. Now, tuck into that blanket, Sylvie. You too, Suze. Time we all tucked in, else we’ll be dead to the world come morning, and Sylvanus will be washing his own hair, wondering what happened to us.”
I BEGGED OFF BREAKFAST with Mother and Suze come morning, and walked for a long hour through the hilly, tree-lined streets of Corner Brook. Many things came to me, most of them about Mother, prompted by that ill look on her face the night before. She’d been quiet that morning, letting Suze do most of the talking. Even with Father she’d been quiet, her drawn expression a carryover from last evening’s conversation no doubt, for she kept looking at me, silently appraising me as one might an unread book, attempting to deduce its most hidden secrets from the few lines scratched across its cover. As I was trying to read her.
At one point she’d turned quickly from Father’s pale face and croaky voice, her eyes welling up with sudden tears, and I quietly passed her a tissue, unobtrusively taking up Father’s attention with a glass of orange juice. She touched my shoulder gently, almost shy like. It triggered for me the occasion when Gran found the watch Father had given me for my birthday, back when I was a girl, and I’d been too shy to properly hook it around my wrist and Mother had done so for me. Her eyes had momentarily brushed mine as she bent towards me, hooking the strap, and I’d glimpsed her shyness, recognizing it immediately, for it was the same meekness that was guarding my own heart during that moment. I remembered too how she’d been wearing her new red dress, and how special it made the moment feel, that she was wearing it for my birthday. And how, when I’d impulsively told her how pretty it was, she bent down and nuzzled her forehead against mine.
It broadened my heart, that nuzzling of brows. And yet, how fleeting the moment had been. Within a heartbeat Mother was fussing over the teapot having cooled, ushering Gran back to her chair to finish her dinner, scolding me gently for getting jam on my dress—rendering the nuzzling one of those things that mothers do without thinking, like patting a loaf of bread before slicing it.
I wondered now if Mother remembered that moment, and if so, how her account of it might differ from mine, and if so, which of us had knowingly or unknowingly played editor, rewriting a more desirable ending for a more palatable self. Where, then, does truth go?
An illness crept into my stomach. What of memory is truth? It was a staggering thought, and for a moment I felt a great fear, like those split seconds sometimes upon awakening when all sense of self is still caught back in the nether world of sleep and the eyes alone are opened onto the blankness of a room without memory. I clutched my arms around myself, needing to feel the solidity of flesh and bone, like the ghosts from Cooney Arm whose lives have been vanquished into time, leaving behind fragments of soul clinging to wood, no longer knowing what, if anything, is real, and frightened of their invisibility.
The air was becoming cool, my legs tiring from the long walk. I started back to the hospital, quivering a little, as though the bones that had formed within me were transmuting back to the pliability of youth, faltering beneath the rigidity I’d been sculpting upon them during the past years.
WHEN I RETURNED Mother and Suze had gone for lunch and it was Chris visiting with Father, who sat stiffly now in a chair beside his bed. With his crop of black hair somewhat fashioned into place and his hospital johnny-coat replaced by the blue-striped pyjamas he wore at home during cold nights, Father was looking less like a corpse and even sounding a bit like himself as he asked in a rough, wheezy voice about his boat, the wind, the ice, groaning his displeasure as I scolded him about his worrying.
“You’ll need your moaning for when you gets out and can’t find your paddles,” I said, my fingers combing his hair affectionately. “Mom told him she’s burning them,” I said to Chris. “Said she’s gonna lay Father out in his boat like it was a cradle, and moor it off the kitchen window.”
Chris smiled stiffly, his colour resembling the morning’s porridge.
“Have to sell the boat,” said Father.
I jolted, as surprised by the urgency in his tone as by the statement itself.
“She thinks I don’t know,” he went on, his voice falling into a whisper. “I heard them. Outside the curtain. Not allowed back in the woods.” He shook his head over our splutters of protest.
“You don’t worry about nothing,” blurted Chris, “I’ll take care of the truck till you gets on your feet—” He stopped, silenced by a silvery bead of water swelling out of the corner of Father’s eye.
I hand-scrubbed Father’s head. “Turned down,” I sniffed. “You’ll be back on your feet and working in no time, you know it. You don’t listen to them, Dad. And I got money enough saved—stop looking like that,” I cried as Father cringed beneath my words, his shame burning through his skin. “You’ve done for us all these years, it’s our turn now to do something for you, will you let us?”
He shook his he
ad weakly and I fell silent, feeling like a tyrant youngster trampling over his sick heart, and he too weak to lift me off.
Chris leaned forward in his chair, then back, grasping at his knees while he stared at Father, as though resisting the urge to touch him. He raised his eyes to mine, sharing the wretched secret he was carrying in his heart. But this father who had borne our growing years with gentleness, who had put aside his own passions and hurt for our own well-being, was not about to be abandoned. I felt the conflict in my brother’s heart, I saw the resolve in his eyes.
“I’LL SEE YOU TOMORROW,” Chris said as I walked him to the parking lot around noon. He dug out the keys to Father’s truck, a brand-new 1980 Chevy Silverado, and unlocked the door, letting out that newish smell of vinyl and leather as he swung it open. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, hushing my need to talk, “we’ll see about things tomorrow.”
He drove off, a sense of urgency to the tilt of his head as he leaned over the wheel, shading his eyes with the visor, pulling abruptly onto the city street. A gleam of sunshine from the roof of the cab and he was lost from sight amidst the city traffic, leaving me with a pounding headache and a sudden desire to be sitting beside him rather than facing another long day with Mother.
I turned wearily back to the hospital. I’d be flying back to Alberta the next morning and wanted to spend as much time as possible with Father. Thankfully, Suze was still about, although she spent the greater part of the day shopping, leaving Mother and me to ourselves.
“Ben never did come much—after he left,” I said to Mother. “How come—Suze sure dotes on him.”
“Doted too much,” said Mother.
“How so?” I asked.
Mother was tidying the sitting room from where we had spent the night. She shook her head to my questioning, passing me the flannel sheets to fold.
“Well, then?” I pushed, unable to curb my curiosity about Ben.
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